Analysis of Strategic Organizational Communication (pat 19)

Emotion Regulation and Unobtrusive Control
by
Charles Lamson

So far we have discussed cultural control in terms of employees' thoughts - the ways in which they come to identify with the dominant beliefs and values of their organizations. But human human beingsare not only thinking creatures; they also are emotional beings. Emotions are relevant to cultural forms of motivation and control in three ways. At the simplest level, organizations can overtly manipulate employees' emotional responses. 

The emotions may be positive, as in ceremonies of enhancement. Often employees receive recognition based as much on complying with the organization's demands as on making tangible contributions. 

In any case, public recognition of subordinates serves to solidify the supervisors power position, And because she or he makes the decision about whom to recognize and how to do so, negative emotions serve similar control functions. For example, many observers of the downsizing and outsourcing of tasks that dominated U.S. firms during the 1990s, believe that both practices are designed more to control workers through fear and anxiety than to enhance organizational efficiency. 

Manipulating negative emotions reduces employees' self-esteem and makes them more compliant; they follow orders more readily and are less likely to see emotional manipulation as a control strategy. For example, Pan American flight attendants (who had been made to feel shame about their age, weight or sexual orientation) were more likely to refuse to go along with a union slowdown, and vote against their co-workers, than those who had not experienced degradation. Supervisors who are made to feel embarrassed for mixing with their subordinates, tend to withdraw from them and become more autocratic.

Control also is exercised when employees learn to interpret emotions in ways that are preferred by the organization. Emotional responses are highly ambiguous. Fear and excitement feel very much the same, so they must be interpreted. The core beliefs and values of an organization often tell employees how to interpret their emotional responses. They may learn to feel pride only when the organization's goals are met, not when their own objectives are fulfilled. For example, flight attendants may be successfully taught to interpret their anger at obnoxious passengers as care and concern for their helpless and dependent charges.

Finally, employees may learn to actually feel the emotions that are desired by their organizations. The process begins when employees are taught to obey particular display rules as part of their jobs. For example, people who work in the leisure/tourism industry are required to constantly display positive emotions, and to elicit them in their clients or customers. Flight attendants and cruise ship employees are expected to be happy, perky and concerned about meeting their customers' needs and to make the customers feel the same positive emotions.

In contrast, bill collectors are expected to display negative emotions (guilt) from the people they contact. Other employees must display neutral or no emotions, even in crisis situations to calm the people around them.

Many times with 911, a crisis is involved. For example, a  burglar is actually in someone's home. Operators are expected to remain calm, collected and emotionally distant. Employees can manage these demands in three different ways. they may pretend that they feel the emotions that they display. This is a process that usually is labeled "surface acting." This kind of acting is exhausting in many ways. It is easier to manage the dissonance and discomfort created by surface acting by learning to actually feel the desired emotions - to engage in a kind of deep acting.

For example, Arlie Hochschild's study of flight attendants found that emotions are often not just responses to work, but that emotion control is the work. Flight attendants learn to experience only the feelings that are required by their organizational roles, and to suppress other feelings. They create a package of emotions, and emotional displays, in which genuinely felt emotions are transformed into organizationally acceptable emotions. 

In a way, this is the easiest response to organizational demands for emotion regulation. Acting in either its surface or deep forms, creates dissonance (it is uncomfortable to feel one thing - for instance, feeling disgust at a client's lifestyle) and display another (warmth and concern). and is exhausting to continually do so - acting takes a great deal of effort. 

This dissonance is lowest, and the amount of effort is reduced, when one actually feels the emotions that he or she is supposed to feel and express. But if employees learn to deal with it emotion (emoticism) management, it can increase job satisfaction and enhance feelings of connectedness, as well as, causing workers to believe that they are performing their tasks well, and having a major impact at work. This is why employees who have been in careers that require emotion management for a long time experience less dissonance and less effort than newcomers to such a profession.

*SOURCE:  STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY, SIXTH EDITION BY CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE; PAGES 171-173*

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