Work-group emotional climate, emotion management skills, and service attitudes and performance

Abstract

At the same time that the emotional demands of service work are receiving increasing attention in the literature, academic and popular authors are proposing that person characteristics, namely emotional intelligence or emotional competencies, determine one's effectiveness in dealing with these emotional demands. In this article, we argue for a multi-level perspective of emotions, where the emotional characteristics of organisations and groups affect and are affected by the emotional characteristics of the individuals comprising them. In particular, we develop a theoretical model depicting the dynamic interplay between a workgroups' emotional climate, employee emotion management skills and customer and provider satisfaction in a service setting.