What is emotional intelligence?
ability to understand and manage emotions of yourself and others
Emotional Labor: 4 dimensions
- Frequency of emotional display
- Attentiveness to required display of rules
- Duration
- Intensity - Variety of emotions required to express
- Emotional Dissonance
Antecedents for emotional dissonance
- Face-to-face contact
- Job autonomy (-)
- Positive affectivity / negative emotion
- Negative affectivity /positive emotion
–> negative for job satisfaction
What is Necessary Evil?
a work-related task in which an individual must perform an act that causes emotional or physical harm to someone else for the greater purpose
3 characteristics of necessary evil
- necessary
- inflict ineradicable harm (evil)
- mandatory
9 Dimensions of Necessary Evil
- Task:
- task complexity
- task frequency
- Agency:
- casual role played by performer
- performance involvement in necessary evil
- legitimacy of necessary evil
- Impact:
- magnitude of harm and benefit
- impact it bears on performance experience
- salience of harm and benefit
- identity of the target
4 Psychological States
- Experienced responsibility
- Perceived justifiability
- Experienced task difficulty
- Experienced palpability
Consequences of Experienced responsibility
the greater the felt responsibility, the higher the guilt
Consequences of Justifiability
- the less justifiable,
the higher the guilt
the higher the sympathy
Consequences of task difficulty
- the more difficult the task,
the higher the cognitive load,
the higher the performance anxiety
Consequences of palpability
the greater the palpability of the harm, the higher the sympathy, the higher the guilt, the higher the cognitive load, the higher the performance anxiety
Organizational Influences on necessary evil
- task design
- task structure
Task design
- exposure
-> how closely do you have to interact with the person
when you deliver bad new? (-> email, phone,…) - fragmentation
-> distributing the task between different actors
(decreases responsibility)
Task framing
- social accounts
-> framing the consequences of necessary evil in a
positive way - goals
-> knowing why you are performing necessary evil
-> assign meaning to the task
interpersonal sensitivity
carrying out necessary evil with respect and dignity
-> cognitive capacity and motivation for interpersonal sensitivity is taxed by internal drama (guilt, sympathy, performance anxiety and cognitive load)
Pifalls of firing someone
- postponement
- “hang yourself” method (making other person come to conclusion)
- “sweetening the pill”
- comforting the other when there is little reason
- (over-) justification of the message (because of guilt)
