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Article Excerpt
Emotional labour refers to the regulation of one's feelings and emotional displays for a wage (Hochshild, 1983). A central tenet of emotional labour theory is that employees must follow emotional display rules that specify which emotions are appropriate and how those emotions should be expressed to others (Diefendorff & Richard, 2003; Ekman, 1973). Given the central role of display rules in emotional display management (e.g. Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Gosserand & Diefendorff, 2005; Grandey, 2000), it is essential that employees be aware of and understand the display expectations of the job. However, as pointed out by various authors (e.g. Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Cropanzano, Weiss, & Elias, 2004; Grandey & Brauburger, 2002), display rules are often not explicitly stated by organizations but exist as unwritten norms. If organizations are not clear in stating the emotional display expectations of the job, employees may differ in whether they consider associated behaviours (e.g. smiling or suppressing anger) to be formal parts of the job. When employees perceive display rules as being required, they should be more likely to display the corresponding emotions (Grandey & Brauburger, 2002). In contrast, if display rules are not perceived as required, employees may believe that conforming to them is going above and beyond the call of duty and may feel less compelled to do so. Consistent with this idea, Morrison (1994) found that employees who believed that specific behaviours were in-role requirements were more likely to perform those behaviours than employees who considered the same behaviours to be extra-role.
At this point in time, the extent to which employees consider display-related behaviours to be formal job duties is unknown (Grandey & Braubuger, 2002). Thus, the first purpose of this investigation was to examine whether employees and their supervisors consider emotional display behaviours to be formal job requirements (in-role) versus behaviours that go above and beyond formal expectations (extra-role). In addition, we examined occupational and individual difference antecedents of how employees categorize emotional display behaviours. Specifically, job-based differences in interpersonal requirements and employee attitudes (job satisfaction and job involvement) were examined as predictors of the extent to which employees considered emotional display behaviours to be part of their jobs. Examining these predictors will provide some insight into why employees differ in the belief that emotional displays are required versus discretionary activities.
A second main purpose of this investigation was to examine the extent to which employees and their supervisors agree in categorizing emotional display behaviours as in-role or extra-role. Implicit in much of the emotional labour research is the notion that display rules reflect norms for interacting with others. Examining the level of agreement between employees and supervisors will provide some insight into the extent to which display-rule perceptions are shared by people at work. Further, job-based differences in interpersonal requirements were examined as predictors of this agreement in an attempt to understand the role that objective features of the work may have in influencing the convergence of employee and supervisor perceptions. The following sections review past research, develop hypotheses and present an investigation examining these research questions in a sample of part-time workers.
Emotional display rules
Emotional display rules can be defined as the standards for the appropriate expression of emotions on the job (Rafaeli & Sutton, 1987). These standards identify how emotions should or should not be displayed in the workplace. Thus, display rules are intended to constrain employee emotional expressions to be a certain way so as to facilitate the attainment of desired performance objectives (Diefendorff & Gosserand, 2003). Research has begun to confirm some of these linkages, showing that display rules predict employee emotional displays (e.g. Diefendorff & Richard, 2003) and employee emotional displays predict customer perceptions of service effectiveness (e.g. Pugh, 2001) and customer intentions to return (e.g. Tsai, 2001).
In most jobs, display rules are aimed at creating positive interpersonal interactions by having employees display integrative emotions, which are positive emotions intended to bring people together (Wharton & Erickson, 1993). Some jobs, such as judge or therapist, require the display of neutral emotions. Individuals in these jobs must hide both positive and negative emotions, which has been called emotional masking (Wharton & Erickson, 1993). Additionally, there are some unique jobs where expressing negative, or differentiating, emotions is expected (e.g. bill collector, police interrogator). However, jobs requiring integrative emotional displays are probably the most common (Cropanzano et al., 2004). Displaying integrative emotions can involve both expressing positive emotions and suppressing negative emotions. Consistent with this idea, past research has identified two types of display rules that facilitate these emotional expressions: demands to express positive emotions and demands to suppress negative emotions (e.g. Brotheridge & Grandey, 2002; Diefendorff, Croyle, & Gosserand, 2005; Schaubroeck & Jones, 2000). Based on this past research, the present investigation will focus on display rules involved in expressing positive emotions and suppressing negative emotions.
The term emotional display rule connotes the idea of a formal expectation handed down from management to employees in explicit terms. While examples of formally stated display rules can be found in the literature (e.g. Disney Corporation; VanMaanen & Kunda, 1989), these may be the exception rather than the rule (Cropanzano et al., 2004). Most companies have no policies at all regarding emotional displays, refer to them only in their mission statements or rely on societal or professional expectations to communicate norms about appropriate displays (Zapf, 2002). The lack of a clear policy and the use of informal methods to communicate display expectations raise questions about the extent to which display rules are actually perceived by workers to be part of their jobs. The following sections discuss the distinction between in-role and extra-role behaviours, develop hypotheses about display-rule role perceptions and present a study testing those hypotheses.
In-role versus extra-role behaviours
Katz (1964) was one of the first organizational researchers to distinguish between in-role and extra-role behaviours. In-role behaviours involve activities that are formally required, enforceable and evaluated, whereas extra-role behaviours are discretionary, not enforceable and not formally evaluated (Organ, 1997). Examples of in-role behaviours for a car salesperson might be greeting customers and getting them to test drive cars. Examples of extra-role behaviours for a car salesperson might be picking up lunch for one's co-workers or answering the phones for the service department while they are busy. However, caution should be taken in trying to label behaviours as in-role or extra-role in absolute terms because many behaviours may be placed in either category (Motowidlo, 2003), depending on a variety of circumstances (e.g. the person, job, organization or occupation). For instance, one manager may consider covering the phones for the service department to be required, whereas another manager may not.
The notion that the same behaviour might be in-role to some employees and extra-role to others was confirmed in a study by Morrison (1994) that examined the role categorizations of organizational citizenship behaviours (OCBs). At the time of Morrison's study, OCBs were defined in the literature as strictly extra-role behaviours (Organ, 1988); that is, they were considered discretionary activities that were not formally rewarded. However, Morrison found that the majority of employees actually considered OCBs to be in-role behaviours. She also reported that employees and supervisors had a low level of agreement in categorizing OCBs as in-role or extra-role, although this conclusion may be suspect given that it was based on correlational analyses rather than indices of inter-rater agreement (we return to this point later in the paper). Nevertheless, Morrison's work contributed to the reconceptualization of OCBs as not necessarily being extra-role activities (see Organ, 1997). Indeed, Organ (1997) suggested that OCBs should be redefined to be equivalent to contextual performance (Borman & Motowidlo, 1993). Morrison's findings have since been replicated in different cultures (Lam, Hui, & Law, 1999) and in a sample of young workers (Vey & Campbell, 2004).
In our effort to examine how people define the emotional display requirements of their jobs, we adopted Morrison's (1994) methodology. Specifically, employees and their supervisors were asked to categorize several emotional display behaviours as either (a) expected parts of the job or (b) behaviours that go above and beyond job expectations. Categorization rates were examined for specific display behaviours as weU as for aggregate measures, termed display-rule breadth. The display rule-breadth measures were calculated as the proportion of behaviours within an emotional display category classified by employees as being an expected part of the job (see Morrison, 1994). Thus, individuals with high breadth scores defined more of the emotional display behaviours in a category as being required than employees with low breadth scores. Although we anticipated two display-rule categories corresponding to expressing positive emotions and suppressing negative emotions, the dimensionality of the ratings was examined empirically.
Are emotional displays in-role or extra-role behaviours?
Grandey and Brauburger (2002) first raised the issue of whether emotional display rules should be considered in-role or extra-role expectations. The category to which an emotional display rule belongs is important because employees may be more likely to conform to it if they believe it is in-role than if they believe it is extra-role (Grandey & Brauburger, 2002). Employees who do not think that an emotional display is required may express whatever emotions they consider to be appropriate, resulting in wide variability in the emotional displays of employees (Diefendorff & Gosserand, 2003). This variability in emotional displays would presumably have a negative impact on bottom-line outcomes such as sales and customer satisfaction (e.g. Pugh, 2001; Tsai, 2001).
Many depictions of emotional display rules have a distinct 'in-role' flavour, emphasizing how emotional displays relate to employee job duties and the task requirements of their work (e.g. Cropanzano et al., 2004; Grandey, 2000; Zapf, Seifert, Schmutte, Mertini, & Holz, 2001). For instance, Diefendorff and Gosserand (2003) described display rules as subgoals that individuals strive to attain in order to meet higher-order performance goals. An example would be the expectation that a salesperson should display positive emotions when interacting with customers. These positive displays are intended to 'spread' positive emotions to customers through contagion processes (Hatfield, Cacioppo, & Rapson, 1994; Pugh, 2002). These positive emotions felt by customers are expected to increase the likelihood that they will buy the organization's product. In such situations, employees' emotional displays directly contribute to the attainment of their primary work activities (e.g. selling products), suggesting that display rules ought to be in-role requirements. Based on these ideas, it was anticipated that expressing positive emotions and suppressing negative emotions would be categorized by employees and their supervisors as inrole behaviours more often than as extra-role behaviours. This possibility was examined for both specific display behaviours and the display rule-breadth variables (i.e. the proportion of display-related behaviours within a category considered to be in-role).
Hypothesis I. Emotional display behaviours are considered to be in-role activities at a higher rate than they are considered to be extra-role activities.
Antecedents of emotional display-rule breadth
Job attitude antecedents
Job satisfaction and job involvement were examined as predictors of employee display-rule breadth. Job satisfaction is defined as the extent to which individuals find that their jobs fulfil some internal desire or need (Judge, Bono, Thoresen, & Patton, 2001; Locke, 1976). Job involvement refers to the extent to which individuals are deeply engaged in or preoccupied with their work (Brown, 1996; Diefendorff, Brown, Kamin, & Lord, 2002). Morrison (1994) found that job attitudes predicted how broadly individuals defined their jobs. For example, satisfied employees were more likely to endorse OCBs as in-role behaviours than unsatisfied individuals.
Past research on display rules suggests that the effect of attitudes on display-rule role perceptions may depend on the nature of the display-related behaviours. Diefendorff and Richard (2003) and Schaubroeck and Jones (2000) asked employees to rate the extent to which display rules for expressing positive emotions and suppressing negative emotions were present in their jobs. Diefendorff and Richard found that job satisfaction was positively correlated with display rules for expressing positive emotions and negatively correlated with display rules for suppressing negative emotions. Schaubroeck and Jones found the same pattern of relationships for job...
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