Supervisor‐Directed Emotional Labor as Upward Influence: An Emotions‐as‐Social‐Information Perspective

Abstract

To access organizational resources, subordinates often strive to influence supervisors' impressions. Moreover, subordinates' interactions with supervisors are known to be ripe with emotions. Nevertheless, research on upward impression management has rarely examined how subordinates' emotion regulation in supervisor interactions may shape their tangible outcomes. The present study introduces subordinates' emotional labor toward supervisors as a novel means of upward influence. Building on the emotions-as-social-information model, we propose that supervisor-directed emotional labor indirectly relates with supervisory reward recommendations by shaping supervisors' liking and perceived competence of subordinates. Moreover, we cast supervisors' epistemic motivation as a boundary condition for these indirect relations.We tested these notions using time-lagged data from 377 subordinates and 91 supervisors. When supervisors' epistemic motivation was higher (but not lower), (1) supervisor-directed surface acting related negatively with supervisors' liking and perceived competence of subordinates and (2) supervisor-directed deep acting related positively with supervisors' liking of subordinates. Liking and perceived competence, in turn, related positively with supervisors' willingness to recommend subordinates for organizational rewards. These findings highlight supervisor-directed emotional labor as an upward impression management strategy with both beneficial (deep acting) and detrimental (surface acting) implications, and they illustrate important mechanisms and a key contingency factor for these consequences.

Awe Guards My Creativity: The Interactive Effect of Perceived Abusive Supervisory Behavior, Dispositional Awe, and Creative Self-Efficacy on Chinese Employee Creativity

“…In this work, we focused on the cognitive mechanism of the EASI model as previous studies demonstrated that affective reactions might converge with cognitions (Wang et al, 2017 ). The EASI model also posits that the expresser's characteristics may change how observers interpret and react to other's actions and emotions (Van Kleef, 2017 ; Deng et al, 2020 ). Drawing on this idea, we argue that supervisor dispositional awe predicts an employee's evaluation of their creative self-efficacy and creativity.…”

Emotion suppression and perceptions of interpersonal citizenship behavior: Faking in good faith or bad faith?

“…Research has shown that employees frequently use emotion suppression in the workplace, for example, when interacting with customers (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993), supervisors (Deng, Walter, & Guan, 2020), and colleagues or teammates (Cole et al, 2008; Hu & Shi, 2015). Individuals generally employ this strategy of emotion regulation to avoid expressions of counternormative emotionality which, depending on situational requirements, may entail suppression of both positive and negative emotion displays (Gross & John, 2003; Gross & Levenson, 1993).…”

“…In this regard, scholars have cast others' regulated emotion displays as “powerful signals … during interpersonal interactions” that provide important information to observers about an actor's attitudes, dispositions, and intentions (Côté, 2005, p. 514; see also Côté et al, 2013; Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987, 1989). Logically, then, empirical research has repeatedly linked diverse strategies of emotion regulation with observers' inferences about an actor and with observers' subsequent behavioral responses (e.g., Deng et al, 2020; Hu & Shi, 2015; Srivastava et al, 2009). An employee's attempt to disguise his or her true emotionality through emotion suppression, in particular, may trigger distinct conclusions regarding this employee's authenticity and interactional goals, with important consequences for others' perceptions of and reactions toward the focal employee (Côté, 2005; Groth, Hennig‐Thurau, & Walsh, 2009).…”

“…Although a social functional perspective on emotion regulation holds that observers can derive relevant (if potentially ambiguous) interpersonal inferences from an actor's emotion suppression, this literature also emphasizes that such inferential processes primarily unfold if observers are willing to pay close attention to an actor's regulated emotion displays and to draw relevant conclusions (Côté et al, 2013; Deng et al, 2020). Scholars have suggested that this condition is particularly likely to be met in “high‐stakes” contexts that are ambiguous and potentially precarious for an observer, requiring elaborate information to understand and cope with a problematic situation (Liu et al, 2015; Van Kleef et al, 2010).…”

“…Importantly, however, theory and research also suggest that the role of emotion suppression is rather complex (Côté et al, 2013). The interpersonal consequences of emotion suppression may hinge on an observer's motivation to decipher the respective displays (Côté, 2005;Deng et al, 2020), for example, and the inferences resulting from such suppression may be highly ambiguous, leaving ample opportunity for observers' interpretations of such behavior as either malevolent or well-meaning (Butler et al, 2003;Le & Impett, 2013;Van Kleef et al, 2010). Consequently, the implications of an actor's emotion suppression are likely to differ markedly, depending on both the immediate social relationship and the broader social environment in which such emotion regulation takes place (Keltner & Haidt, 1999;Van Kleef, 2009;Wang & Groth, 2014).…”