Looking into Meta-Emotions: The Manager-Employee Emotion Dialogue from Cross-Cultural Perspective

Ela Unler, Sibel Caliskan

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaperpeer-review

Abstract

Expressing emotions may not always be comfortable for managers; however, emotional awareness may contribute to employee well-being. In our study, we have aimed to answer “how managers’ feelings about their own emotions (meta-emotions) and recognizing their subordinates’ feelings affect managing diverse emotions at work”. Based on the meta-emotions scale (Mitmansgruber et al., 2009), participants were requested to provide emotion-laden 196work experiences within the last month, where they felt anger, compassionate care, interest, shame/contempt, control, and suppression toward themselves. The questions were conveyed by semi-structured interviews. Through an interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), we collected the “meta-emotion” (total of separate 71) work experiences of 13 managers from service and production sectors in Turkey (TR). Meta-emotions are gathered under four basic themes, as in the literature: NN (negative primary, negative secondary), NP (negative primary, positive secondary), PP (positive primary, positive secondary, and PN (positive primary, negative secondary). Besides, two more separate themes, “self” or “other” orientation of emotions, emerged in TR sample: 1)the primary emotions were mainly other-oriented for NN cases (e.g., anger toward subordinates), PP cases (e.g., proud of themselves after recognition by superiors), and PN cases (e.g., suspicious after an unexpected toleration of their mistake by others), 2) and self-oriented in NP cases (e.g., sparing time to themselves after a distressful workday). From cross cultural perspective, we have started collecting data from British managers (with same methodology) to compare the managers’ emotion-orientation. Supported assumptions will be compared and how studying emotions in different contexts contributes to emotion literature will be discussed. Keywords: primary emotions, secondary emotions, meta-emotions, emotional awareness, well-being
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 20 Jul 2024
Event2024 Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion - Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, United Kingdom
Duration: 17 Jul 202420 Jul 2024
https://www.isre2024.org/

Conference

Conference2024 Conference of the International Society for Research on Emotion
Abbreviated titleISRE 2024
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
CityBelfast
Period17/07/2420/07/24
Internet address

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