What is it about?
Based on a critical incident interviews, the patterns of emotion regulation outcomes stemming from sharing positive and negative work events with coworkers are explored. Symmetrical outcomes are those in which the response of coworkers generates consistent emotional states in the person disclosing the event (e.g., they feel good after sharing a positive story or badly after sharing a negative story). Asymmetrical outcomes are those in which the act of sharing the event results in the opposite emotional state (e.g., feeling good after sharing a negative story or feeling badly after sharing a positive one). Patterns of all four outcomes are found and labeled based on the qualitative data. Most surprisingly, people were more reluctant to share good news than bad news with coworkers for fear their positive emotions would be controverted by the conversation, a fear that has implications for interpersonal behavior and well-being at work.
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Why is it important?
These findings imply that more effort and managerial intervention are required to encourage people to share the positive emotional events that occur at work - people may not do so on their own. Furthermore, organizations may benefit from training and development initiatives to coach people to share and respond to emotional events at work more effectively, particularly in high-stress occupations.
Perspectives
This research was originally designed to answer the question of how people in demanding human service occupations manage the emotional toll of their jobs. Through the interviews, it became clear that such occupations often are open about the bad stuff - sadness about a death, anger about an injustice, helplessness about an intractable situation. There are differences based on people, roles, and organizations, of course, but there was a definite belief that sharing negative emotions was more acceptable with coworkers in general. The positive emotional events, however, were often withheld from discussion - people were worried it would be viewed as wasting time or bragging to share emotions such as happiness, relief, and satisfaction with others. This, in my mind, represents a wasted opportunity to promote a more balanced and broad set of emotion-based interactions at work.
Dr. Constance N Hadley
Stony Brook University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Emotional roulette? Symmetrical and asymmetrical emotion regulation outcomes from coworker interactions about positive and negative work events, Human Relations, June 2014, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0018726714529316.
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