Emotional Accommodation: Women and the Give-and-Take of Emotions in the Workplace
Wed@Hariri: Meet Our Fellows Series
Speaker:
Sanaz Mobasseri, Assistant Professor, Management and Organizations, QST
When:
Wednesday, January 29, 2019
2:45pm – 4:00pm (Networking and refreshments 2:45pm – 3:00pm, talk 3:00pm – 4:00pm, reception to follow)
Where:
Questrom Building, 595 Commonwealth Ave, HAR 410 Boston, MA
Abstract: Conflict between gendered social expectations and conceptions of the ideal worker often restrict women from expressing mainly positive emotions at work. Yet such findings draw largely on interactions between employees and external partners (e.g., clients), leaving open the question of how women express negative emotions, which relational work calls for when interacting with internal partners (e.g., colleagues). I argue that, because women are socialized into roles that entail greater emotional obligations than do men’s roles, they are more likely to modify their expressive tendencies—that is, to accommodate their colleagues’ negative emotions—to achieve the social benefits of emotional mimicry. I test this using the content of 425,649 one-to-one email threads exchanged over six years among 710 full-time employees at a technology firm. I find that women are 16.0 percent less likely than men to express negative emotions and 11.4 percent more likely to express positive emotions. Importantly, I show that women accommodate their colleagues’ negative emotions more than men do. This study thus illustrates emotional accommodation as a novel form of emotion work performed by women who are navigating gendered expectations. I also discuss the implications of such emotional specialization for research on gender and emotional cultures in organizations.
Bio: Sanaz Mobasseri is an Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. Her research investigates how organizational and social network processes shape gender and race differences amongst employees in the workplace. She does this by examining the roles of culture, cognition, and emotion in organizations using field experimental and computational research methodologies. Mobasseri completed her Ph.D. in the Management of Organizations Department at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Prior to her Ph.D., she worked in finance in the U.S. and U.K. She also holds a Master of Public Policy from UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.