Should We Talk About Our Feelings?: New Perspectives on Verbal Communication About Emotions at Work

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Verbal communication about emotions, such as talking about one’s own emotional experiences or inquiring about the emotions of others, is often seen as a taboo topic in the workplace. However, emerging work suggests that verbalization of the emotions of oneself and others can affect important outcomes at the individual, dyadic, team, and organizational levels, such as social learning, engagement, and cooperation. In this symposium, we highlight different perspectives on why, how, and when to verbally communicate about the emotions of yourself or others in organizational contexts. The five papers presented cover a broad range of inter-related topics (e.g., verbal emotional acknowledgment, explicit collective emotion regulation, and verbal emotional expression) and represent different theoretical and empirical perspectives (e.g., including both laboratory and field work). Our discussant, Hillary Anger Elfenbein, a leading scholar in the study of emotions, will close our session by offering a synthesis of the papers and discussing with the audience future directions for the study of verbal communication about emotions at work. Through this symposium, we aim to generate new insights about how we can study verbal communication about emotions at work. Thanks for Nothing: Expressing Gratitude Invites Exploitation by Competitors Presenter: Jeremy Yip; McDonough School of Business Georgetown U. Presenter: Kelly Lee; - Presenter: Cindy Chan; U. of Toronto Presenter: Alison Wood Brooks; Harvard U. The Epistemic Value of Being a Complaint Recipient: A Social Learning Perspective Presenter: Casher Belinda; Kenan-Flagler Business School, U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Presenter: Salvatore J. Affinito; Harvard Business School Presenter: Michael Christian; U. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill The Social Effects of Emotional Expressions are Functionally Equivalent across Expressive Modalities Presenter: Gerben Alexander Van Kleef; U. of Amsterdam Why Followers Don’t Acknowledge the Emotions of their Leaders (and Why they Should) Presenter: Christina Bradley; U. of Michigan, Ross School of Business Presenter: Lindred L. Greer; U. of Michigan, Ross School of Business Presenter: Alisa Yu; Stanford U. Explicit Collective Emotion Regulation and its Influence on Team Process and Viability Presenter: Elizabeth Baily Wolf; INSEAD Presenter: Jacob Levitt; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania Presenter: Sigal Barsade; The Wharton School, U. of Pennsylvania