Emotion suppression and perceptions of interpersonal citizenship behavior: Faking in good faith or bad faith?

Abstract

SummaryTeammates' perceptions of person‐focused interpersonal citizenship behavior (ICB) are important for effective teamwork, and a member's emotion suppression may critically influence others' respective perceptions. The existing research is inconclusive, however, whether emotion suppression is helpful or harmful in this regard. This ambiguity hampers our understanding of the development of ICB perceptions within work teams, and it creates uncertainty as to whether members' emotion suppression is beneficial or detrimental for themselves and the overall team. Hence, we examine a model that specifies important boundary conditions for the emotion suppression–ICB perception linkage. We illustrate a three‐way interactive relation across two studies, such that a member's emotion suppression is positively or negatively associated with a teammate's person‐focused ICB perceptions, depending on both the dyadic interaction context (i.e., relationship conflict) and the overall team context (i.e., goal interdependence). Beyond creating new knowledge on the origins of ICB perceptions, these results reconcile prior, seemingly contradictory perspectives on the role of emotion suppression by explicating when this emotion regulation strategy appears as either “faking in good faith” or “faking in bad faith.” Moreover, reiterating our findings' relevance, we link others' ICB perceptions with members' receipt of ICB from their teammates as well as team performance.