10 .A Bounded Emotionality Perspective on Interpersonal Behavior in Organizations
Neal M. Ashkanasy
Wilfred J. Zerbe

The experience and expression of emotion is an essentially individual phenomenon; however it is tightly bound within a social context. For example, the effects of emotion often become much more pointed when people are in groups. Interactions with others are a primary source of emotions; our relations with others serve to provoke, to help transfer, and to constrain emotions. These kinds of effects are reflected in the intragroup and intergroup situations that are the subject of the chapters in this section. Indeed, De Dreu, West, Fischer, and MacCURTAIN (2001) argued that processes play a special role in developing emotion at this level of analysis. They described group interactions as a process of emotional incubation, where group members’ reactions. The resulting group-level emotional tenor then infuses the whole group, creating what De Rivera(1992,p.197) referred to as group “emotional climate”(see also Barsade,2002; Kelly & Barsade, 2001).
In the first chapter in this section, Matthew Grawitch and David Munz tackle the difficult issue of the role of individual affect in problem-solving workgroups. They present a model where individual and group affect norms influence each stage of ostensibly rational problem solving. The model, which they call GAPS( Group Affect in Problem solving), includes four stages: problem identification; brainstorming; solution development; and implementation. At each of these stages both individual and group affect are influenced by the problem-solving process, with group affect becoming more influential over individual members’ affect as the group matures. Distinctive features of the model are that it covers both positive and negative emotion, and includes reciprocal influences between the individual and the group problem solving process. Although yet to be tested, the model that these authors propose is the first to provide a comprehensive explanation of the nexus between affect and problem-solving in groups.
In chapter8, Stefan Meisidk and Xin Yao address te manner in which emotions are promulgated in groups, through an original theory of social sharing of emotion (SSE) based on humor. In this model, humor is not something light and easily dismissable-as it so often is, outside the model. Instead, it is an essential tool that people at work use to deal with everyday affective issues, and to share experiences. In this model, humor is not just related to positive affect-it also provides a powerful medium for employees to deal with the negative thing that happen to them, including strongly negative issues such as the death of a friend or colleague. Meisiek and Yao provide a thoughtful set of propisitions concerning oth the antecedents and the consequences of humor, including identifying the special roles of” canned”, “practical”, and “situational” humor, and the role of gender.
In the final chapter in this section, Mona White, Charmine Hartel, and Debra Paipucci consider intergroup issues, with a focus on what they refer to as “boundar crossing.” Dealing specifically with cross-cultural communication in the context of strategic business negotiation, they identify in particular miscommunications in this context as “boundary-crossing mishaps.” They argue that these mishaps are affected by numerous factors, including negotiatiors’ understanding of the respective cultures of the parties, negotiation skill. Affective cultural background of the parties, cultural differences, emotional awareness and regulation, negative affect, and discrepancy in convergence-divergence between the parties. Based on Weiss and Croanzano’s(1996) affective events theory, they propose that negotiation ultimately breaks down because of an accumulation of these mishaps. The theory is applied in the specific context of Chinese-Australian negotiation.
The three chapters in this section provide but a glimpse, however, of the topic og emotion in groups and teams. Indeed, we believe that this is perhaps the most underdeveloped arena for future research in the role of emotions in organizational behavior. From the perspective of bounded emotionality, the three chapters are especially convincing. It is clear from these authors’ writing that emotion plays a central role in the way teams function, both endogenously and exogenously. Perhaps the most intriguing of the contributions, however, is Meisidk and Yao’s. Here we see that humor, so often dismissed as unimportant, may be an important component of social cohesion in groups. In their model, the emotional relief of humor serves as the quintessential ingredient of group belongingness, and also as a release for negative events that beset group members from time to time. The practical and research possibilities of these ideas are, to our knowledge unexplored to date.
Mumby and Putnam’s(1992) formulation proposed bounded emotionality as an alternative to bounded rationality. For them, bounded emotionality represented an emancipating organizing principle, based on a feminist reading of organizations, that stood in opposition to those underlying traditional, male-centered, rationally based organizations. It is not that they saw traditions emotions are managed for instrumental means. Indeed, they saw the concept of emotional labor as part of the organizational control inherent to traditional organizations, they proposed instead that organizations “be identified with work feelings rather than emotional labor”: work feelings that are spontaneous and emergent rather than organizationally controlled, based on interrelatedness rather than used as commodities, meaning-centered rather than organizationally ascribed, and based on practical rather than instrumental reasoning. The chapters in this section are centered in traditional organizations, and although they adopt a tolerant view of the rile of emotional in organizations, they implicitly adopt a more or less instrumental view of organizational emotions. Emotions thus serve as means to ends, such as effective problem solving, group harmony, and the outcomes of negotiations. On the one hand, then, hounded emotionality suggests that at the very least we need to acknowledge our assumptions as to the presence g instrumentality among the subjects of our research. Mumby and Putnam would advocate that ideally we would be open to alternative ways of conceiving organizations and become advocates for less instrumental forms of organizing (or forms that have different instrumentalities, i.e., aimed at achieving community rather than profit).
On the other hand it may be that bounded emotionality represents merely an alternative means of control, as Martin, Knopoff, and Beckman (1998) suggested. In their study of the BodyShop, an organization that was characterized by many of the features of a “feminist” organization, they found evidence for markers of bounded emotionality, but also found that organizationally and interpersonally ascribed emotional labor was alive and well, and that at times the expectation on employees to be free with their emotions was equally coercive. In short, and as the chapters in this section make plain, the interplay of individual, organizational, and interpersonal influences on emotions create a complicated puzzle, for which we are only just beginning to make sense of the nature of the elements, much less the dynamics that connect them.