Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dk4vv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-19T04:36:03.426Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - Centrality in the Emotion Helping Network: An Interactionist Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 May 2010

Martin Kilduff
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University
David Krackhardt
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University, Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

An organization can be considered a socio-emotional system in which energy must be continually expended in order to keep the system on course (cf. Katz and Kahn, 1966). Among the many threats to system functioning are negative emotions. The workplace is a site where people often experience negative emotions associated with stress, anxiety, tension, and emotional pain (Basch and Fisher, 2000). Two classic experiments (Latané and Arrowood, 1963; Schachter, Willerman, Hyman, and Festinger, 1961) established that workers involved in all but the most routinized tasks who are subject to negative emotions tend to suffer decrements in the quality and quantity of their production. Further, these negative emotions correlate with individuals' negative work-related attitudes (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996) and health problems (Frost, 2003: 3), and can prove contagious (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson, 1994) with deleterious effects for other employees' levels of cooperation and performance (Barsade, 2002). We know that some people become central actors in dealing with the negative emotions of colleagues (Frost, 2003; Frost and Robinson, 1999), but there is still little understanding of who these unusual people are. In this chapter, we spotlight the emotion helping network and its central players from a personality interaction perspective.

Type
Chapter
Information
Interpersonal Networks in Organizations
Cognition, Personality, Dynamics, and Culture
, pp. 157 - 178
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×