Emotions at Work: Norms of Emotional Expression and Gender Dynamics in Workplace Communication

This dissertation examines how people express and exchange emotions in the workplace and how these expressions relate to their social positions in organizational networks. Prior literature has tended to focus on employees’ expressed emotions towards external actors, such as customers, which are often required by their job roles; this dissertation instead focuses on emotional exchanges between colleagues in routine communications at work. I investigate four key questions: (1) How do people express emotions in the workplace? (2) How do people respond to the emotions of others in the workplace? (3) What kinds of emotional expressions are associated with valuable positions in organizational networks, and for whom? (4) Are there social network rewards (or penalties) associated with engaging in the emotion work of aligning towards colleagues’ emotions? Core to this inquiry is gender, as a primary cultural frame for organizing social relations. I bridge insights from the sociology of gender with the social psychology of emotion to unpack how these factors shapes people’s tendencies to express their emotions, respond to the emotions of their colleagues, and construct and navigate networks inside of organizations.Findings from these studies contribute to research across five domains by: (1) enhancing our understanding of the cultural and emotional experience of employees in the workplace; (2) unearthing a less visible form of emotion work; (3) highlighting gender differences in emotional expressions, emotion work, and social network positions; (4) expanding interactional accounts of how individuals navigate social networks; and (5) identifying gendered and emotional correlates of social network positions