Gendered Displays: Managers' Use of Negative Emotion to Influence Employee Behaviour

Date

2023

Authors

Rae, B.
Kulik, C.
Perera, S.

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Conference paper

Citation

Australia New Zealand Academy of Management (ANZAM), 2023, pp.928-946

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Changing management values and practices for a sustainable future: 36th ANZAM conference (5 Dec 2023 : Wellington, New Zealand, Australia)

Abstract

Despite large (albeit siloed) literatures on influence tactics and emotion displays in the workplace, surprisingly little is known how managers use negative emotion displays to influence employee behaviour. We interviewed 42 Australian managers about their experiences using emotion to change an employee’s problematic behaviour. Thematic analysis demonstrates that managers used three types of emotion display: positive, serious (mild negative), and negative(strong negative). Male managers usually experienced success across all three display types: Employees changed their behaviour and employee-manager relationships were maintained. But female managers were almost twice as likely to be unsuccessful, deploying low clarity expressions that weakened their emotion display’s signalling function. Our findings suggest emotion expression and gender stereotypes operate as boundary conditions on influence tactic effectiveness.

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Copyright 2023 The author(s)

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