A Unique Research Focus on the “New Emotional Labor”

Why is the ILR School an ideal place for you to teach and do your research?

In a sense it is the mission of the ILR School -- Advancing the World of Work -- that brought me here. The faculty and students work at and are interested in boundaries—the boundaries between management and unions, between supervisors and their teams, between shareholder wealth and employee welfare. These are exactly the boundaries that evoke emotions and distrust and the boundaries for which my research and teaching are most critical.

Talk a bit more about your primary research focus and what’s unique about it.

My primary area of research focuses on how social relationships facilitate cooperative, high-performing relationships -- how people understand and proactively manage the negative emotions that others experience during work interactions and collaborative projects. This is a growing area of research.

However, I take a unique approach. Rather than look only at static features of these relationships such as roles or personalities, I investigate how people actively build collaborative, high performing relationships. I also have a unique focus on emotion and trust as core, but interrelated, aspects of building collaboration.

Why are this research, and the work you do relating to trust and emotion, so critical?

This work is so critical because it is often invisible. Managers wonder why an organizational change effort has failed. Supervisors wonder why their employees don’t trust them. Top management teams wonder why a merger or joint venture has failed. But they never reflect on the lack of trust or the fears that the other party might have had about working with them. 

Professionals will increasingly need to engage in emotion work to reduce negative emotions that can inhibit collaborative efforts. I call this the “new emotional labor.”

What are the implications of your research for the workplace? What impact can it have, and is it having?

While this work I’m doing is new, and we don’t yet have all the results from leadership training that is being conducted, we are starting to see that senior-level individuals who engage in efforts to manage other people’s fears and concerns are more trusted by their clients, peers and subordinates and perform better.

Finding ways to help people understand and proactively manage the negative emotions that others experience during work interactions is critical for organizations that depend on the collaborative efforts of their people. Whether it’s a team of people working together in a corporation, a hospital, or a school, establishing good inter-group dynamics is absolutely essential. Unless you can bring people together from different disciplines to work on and help solve problems, it’s going to be hard for organizations to move forward.

- Q&A with Michele Williams