The role of emotions in employees' explanations for failure in the workplace

Abstract

Purpose -The paper aims to study how shame, guilt and fear experienced by failing employees determine their explanation of the failure. Design/methodology/approach -Employees participated in two studies, one assessing actual personal examples of failures and another used imaginary vignettes. To manipulate the extent to which guilt or shame was the dominant emotion experienced by the failing employee, participants were asked to generate counterfactual thoughts typical of each of these feelings. Fear was manipulated by describing a threatening atmosphere in the organization. Measured was the likelihood that the employee took responsibility for what happened and provided a valid explanation. Likelihood of explaining the event by using excuses, justifications, concessions or denials was also measured. Findings -Findings indicate guilt was associated with explanations that help the organization learn from the failure and assist employees in restoring their relationships with the organization and co-workers. Heightened levels of fear, however, decreased this desirable effect of guilt. Shame had no unique contribution to an employee's choice of explanations.Research limitations/implications -The use of self-reports and vignettes limits the ecological validity of the present findings. Nevertheless, it provides preliminary evidence for the importance of the factors under study. Practical implications -These findings contribute to an understanding of the ways organizations can provide emotional settings conductive to constructive failure inquiries both for organizations and employees. Originality/value -The role emotions play in explanation of failures is an understudied issue both in social psychology and organizational research. The present study opens an avenue for more studies in this direction.

Airline employee's service behavior toward different nationalities

“…Generally, a self-report study involved in explicit studies refers to the possibility of a common method variance. Common method variance may also have been the cause of some of the correlations between the measures of this study (Hareli et al, 2005). People are reluctant to admit negative attitudes and beliefs pertaining to social groups and to report their thoughts on these topics (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995).…”

“…Thus, employees require skillful expression and management of their emotions in the service industry (Daus, 2001). Hareli et al (2005) indicated that employees' emotions, such as shame, guilt and fear, impact their explanations of service failures. However, to hypothesize that the airline employees' emotions are positively related to their behavior would be an oversimplification, due to the emotional dissonance.…”

A model of within person variation in leadership: Emotion regulation and scripts as predictors of situationally appropriate leadership

“…Thus, a situationally based negative evaluation of the self in relation to others is a key characteristic of this emotion (Scheff, 1988). What differentiates guilt from other emotions such as shame is that guilt generally emerges with a disclosure of the act, whereas shame is more likely to conceal the act (Hareli, Shomrat, & Biger, 2005) and guilt triggers reparative actions to address the experienced guilt (Johnson & Connelly, 2014;Tangney, 1991). This is particularly significant in our model, as the experience of guilt will result in the leader seeking to address this experience and the most effective way of doing this is to respond in a situationally appropriate way.…”

Tell me who you are and I tell you how you feel: Expected emotional reactions to success and failure are influenced by knowledge about a person's personality

“…Vignettes have been criticized because they represent a reality that is different from the more stimulus‐rich and interactive environment of actual emotional interactions (see Parkinson & Manstead, 1993, for a discussion of this issue). Yet vignettes are an excellent tool to assess the symbolic knowledge about emotion theories and rules that people apply when judging social interactions and forming expectations about the likely reactions of others (Hareli & Hess, 2008, 2010; Hareli, Shomrat, & Biger, 2005; Robinson & Clore, 2002) and in the present context we are precisely interested in these “naïve” theories.…”