Emotional Leaders Can Affect Job Performance

Posted on August 25, 2015 by I/O AT WORK

It’s understandable that we have emotional leaders. After all, on a typical work day, people can experience many emotions. We can be happy about our work, frustrated at a missed deadline, or angry at the way a co-worker treated us. People often express these emotions to others around them, and these displays can affect the performance of those on the receiving end. This influence is especially potent when the displays come from more powerful people like organizational leaders.

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Emotional Labor: How Faking a Smile at Work Affects Job Satisfaction

Posted on September 4, 2013 by I/O AT WORK

Have you ever given a fake smile to someone at work even though you weren’t feeling happy or very excited to see him? If so, you’ve engaged in a process known as emotional labor in which you manage your emotions in order to act in an appropriate way in a work setting. Maybe you wouldn’t go to such efforts when around friends and family, instead feeling free to express the emotions you actually feel. In a work setting though, it may not be best to show your irritation about missing lunch to your brand new client.

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Dealing with Difficult Customers: address the problem, not the emotion

Posted on August 16, 2013 by I/O AT WORK

For customer service agents job performance is affected by which emotion management strategies they use when dealing with difficult customers. According to research by Little, Kluemper, Nelson, and Ward, problem-focused strategies like addressing a problem’s source, decrease caller’s negative feeling and result in positive customer feelings. On the other hand, emotion-focused strategies like distracting the caller from a problem increases in the intensity of a customer’s negative emotions and a decreases their positive emotions.

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Whistle While You Look For Work

Posted on August 7, 2013 by I/O AT WORK

Staying positive increases your chances of finding a job, according to a recent study in Personnel Psychology. Feelings of positive affect relate to job outcomes, such as the number of interviews and job offers. Specifically, positivity influence a job seeker’s motivation and procrastination behavior, which in turn influences job-search outcomes. So, with unemployment at nearly 8%, try to stay positive, and hopefully, good things will come your way.

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Envy At Work: The Tale of Two Envies

Posted on August 5, 2013 by I/O AT WORK

Envy. Since historic times, social comparisons has spurred many conflicts. Envy at work comes in many masks. Undermining someone socially. Not helping them. We can even allow our own job performance to suffer out of envy-driven resentment or spite. We all know how envy can have disastrous consequences. But is envy always bad?

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Do customers make you mad? You have permission to vent

Posted on February 27, 2013 by I/O AT WORK

Publication: Journal of Management (FEB 2013)
Article: Alleviating the burden of emotional labor: The role of social sharing
Authors: McCance, A. S., Nye, C. D., Wang, L., Jones, K. S., & Chiu, C.
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin

If you’ve ever worked in the service industry, you know that some customers can be incredibly frustrating. You get angry, your blood pressure rises, you try really hard to hold your tongue, and then you complain to your coworkers later. And you feel better.

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Get Ahead by Getting Emotional (IO Psychology)

Posted on February 4, 2013 by I/O AT WORK

Topic: Leadership, Emotions
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (NOV 2012)
Article: Looking Down: The Influence of Contempt and Compassion on Emergent
Leadership Categorizations
Authors: S. Melwani, J.S. Mueller, J.R. Overbeck
Reviewed By: Ben Sher, M.A.

Do you want people to think of you as a leader? Do you want to cultivate and mobilize hordes of dedicated minions in pursuit of world domination? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you are in the right place. New research by Melwani, Mueller, and Overbeck (2012) has provided new insight into why certain people are perceived as leaders. Unlike past research, which has focused mainly on personality traits, this study found that certain emotions can be influential as well.

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