Organizational Control and Altruistic Interest in Workers’ Emotional Well-Being

Abstract

Much empirical research on organizational control argues to serve workers’ psychological needs to the extent doing so induces their cooperation. Today, many organizations go beyond this extent to serve those needs as a fundamental goal of its existence. This sustains a context for workers’ attempts at upward influence to be seen as legitimate and tolerated, an implication currently under-explored in organizational control theory. This paper explores the implications for control system design through a three-year in-depth study of a social enterprise that employs marginalized people to advance their well-being. My findings show how workers resist work demands through emotive storytelling (“dramatizing”), raising psychological risk (“catastrophizing”), and invoking a feeling rule of happiness-maintenance (“tone policing”). Further investigation reveals that most of those workers construe happiness to be an entitlement and the organization to violate this right when it directs them to handle stressful work. Others, however, construe happiness as an effortful accomplishment and take stressful responsibilities as occasions for competence building. The difference in their appraisals points to whether they had the intense experience being socialized to adopt a self-evaluative motive for going to work, as opposed to a self-protective motive. Given prevalent interests in how organizations simultaneously enable and control workers, this study develops a control system perspective and highlights the role of emotional socialization in sustaining a productive tension between the two actors.