Emotional acknowledgment in organizations : the benefits and risks of verbalizing the affect of others
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Emotions are omnipresent in organizations, but emotional sensemaking is not. Although emotions have the potential to serve as rapid conduits of social information, organizational practices often impede effective communication using emotions. In this dissertation, I investigate how using verbal language can facilitate the co-construction, calibration, and clarification of emotional communication. In everyday conversations, people acknowledge the emotions of others using language (e.g., saying "You seem excited" or "You look distraught"). I examine the role of this simple, but potentially meaningful act of emotional acknowledgment—verbal communication by which a perceiver signals the recognition of an expresser's emotions—in facilitating emotional sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Because emotional communication usually relies heavily on drawing inferences from non-verbal cues (van Kleef, 2009), I argue that explicitly verbalizing these inferences through emotional acknowledgment can reap important social and informational benefits while also coming with considerable risk. Using an organizational lens, I explore the consequences of emotional acknowledgment in three dissertation chapters. In the first chapter, I examine how emotional acknowledgment provides information about the quality of our social relationships, thereby facilitating the development of interpersonal trust. In the second chapter, I show how emotional acknowledgment can facilitate team performance by surfacing hidden team information. In the third and final chapter, I investigate how expressers use emotional acknowledgment as feedback to change their own self-presentation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2021; ©2021 |
| Publication date | 2021; 2021 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Yu, Alisa |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Berg, Justin |
| Thesis advisor | Berg, Justin |
| Thesis advisor | Flynn, Francis J |
| Thesis advisor | Sorensen, Jesper B, 1967- |
| Degree committee member | Flynn, Francis J |
| Degree committee member | Sorensen, Jesper B, 1967- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Graduate School of Business |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Alisa Yu. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Graduate School of Business. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2021. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/qg806fd3772 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2021 by Alisa Yu
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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