Supervisor‐Directed Emotional Labor as Upward Influence: An Emotions‐as‐Social‐Information Perspective

• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Author: Yanjun Guan,Frank Walter,Hong Deng
• Date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2424

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Supervisor-Directed Emotional Labor as Upward Influence: An

Emotions-as-Social-Information Perspective

Hong Deng

1

| Frank Walter

2

| Yanjun Guan

1

1

Durham University Business School Durham

University, UK

2

Faculty of Economics and Business Studies,

Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany

Correspondence

Yanjun Guan, Durham University.

Email: yanjun.guan@gmail.comor

Hong Deng, Durham University.

Email: xhxghome@gmail.com

Summary

To access organizational resources, subordinates often strive to influence supervi-

sors' impressions. Moreover, subordinates' interactions with supervisors are known

to be ripe with emotions. Nevertheless, research on upward impression management

has rarely examined how subordinates' emotion regulation in supervisor interactions

may shape their tangible outcomes. The present study introduces subordinates' emo-

tional labor toward supervisors as a novel means of upward influence. Building on

the emotions-as-social-information model, we propose that supervisor-directed emo-

tional labor indirectly relates with supervisory reward recommendations by shaping

supervisors' liking and perceived competence of subordinates. Moreover, we cast

supervisors' epistemic motivation as a boundary condition for these indirect relations.

We tested these notions using time-lagged data from 377 subordinates and 91 super-

visors. When supervisors' epistemic motivation was higher (but not lower), (1) super-

visor-directed surface acting related negatively with supervisors' liking and perceived

competence of subordinates and (2) supervisor-directed deep acting related posi-

tively with supervisors' liking of subordinates. Liking and perceived competence, in

turn, related positively with supervisors' willingness to recommend subordinates for

organizational rewards. These findings highlight supervisor-directed emotional labor

as an upward impression management strategy with both beneficial (deep acting) and

detrimental (surface acting) implications, and they illustrate important mechanisms

and a key contingency factor for these consequences.

KEYWORDS

emotional labor, deep acting, impression management, surface acting, upward influence

Formal supervisors critically shape their subordinates' rewards, bene-

fits, and career outcomes (Allen & Rush, 1998). Hence, the literature

on upward impression management has shown that subordinates

employ an array of tactics to appear as more likable and competent to

their supervisors and, thus, to gain access to key organizational

resources (Leary & Kowalski, 1990; Wayne & Liden, 1995).

Such behaviors include self-promotion (i.e., highlighting one's accom-

plishments), ingratiation (i.e., doing favors or giving flattery), and

exemplification (i.e., depicting one's actions as exemplary; Turnley &

Bolino, 2001).

Beyond such traditionally examined tactics, however, subordi-

nates may also use more subtle means of self-regulation as vehi-

cles of upward impression management in their everyday

interactions with supervisors (Thoits, 1996). We argue that subordi-

nates' emotion regulation is particularly important in this regard. In

fact, it is well-known that individuals strategically use emotion dis-

plays to impact relevant others, such that emotions are “expressed

intentionally to produce the desired appraisal”(Gibson & Schroeder,

2002, p. 197; see also Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993). Moreover,

prior research has shown that supervisor-subordinate encounters

Received: 30 July 2018 Revised: 17 December 2019 Accepted: 18 December 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2424

384 © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2020;41:384–402.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job

are ripe with emotions, and processes of emotion regulation may

therefore be particularly relevant in such interactions (e.g., Gooty,

Connelly, Griffith, & Gupta, 2010; Humphrey, 2002). Scholars have

argued, accordingly, that both supervisors and subordinates hold

specific expectations and norms for how subordinates should act

towards supervisors (Carsten, Uhl-Bien, West, Patera, & McGregor,

2010)—and these norms entail subordinates' expressions of appro-

priate emotionality as a key element (Sy, 2010; Xu, Liu, & Guo,

2014). On this basis, systematic consideration of subordinates'

deliberate emotion regulation in supervisor interactions

(i.e., supervisor-directed emotional labor) seems crucial to ade-

quately understand how subordinates may influence their supervi-

sors to attain desired outcomes.

Nevertheless, the upward impression management literature

has not incorporated subordinates' emotion regulation toward their

supervisors to date, and research on emotional labor has only

started to touch upon this issue (Hu & Shi, 2015; Xu et al., 2014).

We therefore believe further research is needed to complement

our knowledge, illustrating supervisor-directed emotional labor as a

common means of upward influence that may shape relevant out-

comes for subordinates, above-and-beyond other, traditionally

examined tactics. More specifically, such research may advance

theory on upward impression management by highlighting (a) how

subordinates regulate their emotion expressions toward supervisors,

(b) why such emotion regulation may promote (or hinder) subordi-

nates' access to tangible organizational resources, and (c) when

such emotion regulation is particularly relevant as an instrument of

upward influence.

We draw from the “emotions as social information”model

(EASI; Van Kleef, 2009, van Kleef, 2014) and its extensions toward

emotion regulation (Côté, Van Kleef, & Sy, 2013) to address these

issues. This conceptual perspective integratively depicts important

psychological processes and contingency factors underlying

observers' behavioral reactions toward others' (regulated) emotion

displays. First, the EASI model suggests that an actor's emotion

expressions shape observers' reactions via two distinct pathways

(Côté et al., 2013; Van Kleef, 2009; van Kleef, 2014), namely

(a) through observers' affective responses (including both general

emotions [e.g., positive or negative affect] and interpersonal emo-

tions directed toward the actor [e.g., liking]) and (b) through

observers' task-related inferences (e.g., about an actor's compe-

tences). And second, the EASI model stipulates that an observer's

information processing style may shape the strength of these path-

ways, altering both observers' attentiveness toward others' emotion

displays and the depth of the associated conclusions (Van Kleef,

2009; van Kleef, 2014).

As shown in Figure 1, we therefore propose a dual-pathway

contingency framework to explicate the linkage between subordi-

nates' emotional labor in supervisor interactions and an important

outcome under direct supervisory control (i.e., reward recommen-

dations; defined as a supervisor's willingness to suggest a subordi-

nate for organizational rewards, bonuses, or benefits; Allen & Rush,

1998). This framework casts a supervisor's liking and perceived

competence of a focal subordinate as key psychological mecha-

nisms, and it postulates a supervisor's epistemic motivation (i.e., a

personality trait that indicates the extent to which individuals pro-

cess information with the “desire to develop and maintain a rich

and accurate understanding of situations"; Van Kleef et al., 2009,

p. 564) as a critical contingency factor. Moreover, it incorporates

the common distinction between surface acting and deep acting as

separate emotional labor strategies. Building on prior research

(Grandey, 2000; Gross, 1998), we conceptualize supervisor-directed

surface acting as a form of response-focused emotion regulation,

with subordinates faking appropriate emotion displays when inter-

acting with their supervisor. By contrast, supervisor-directed deep

acting represents a form of antecedent-focused emotion regulation,

FIGURE 1 Overall Research Model (Note: All variables below the dashed line are at the individual subordinates' level.)

DENG ET AL. 385