How do high-tech industry remote team employees learn to manage their emotions?

ABSTRACT

High-tech employees, need to manage their emotions on a daily basis, given their interactions with culturally different colleagues; nonetheless, they are not given much direction about such issues. Based on interviews with 75 Israeli workers employed by 25 high-tech companies, this study explains the display rules in high-tech organizations and the ways employees learn to manage their emotions. The results indicate that high-tech, global team employees engage regularly in emotional labor with co-workers while experiencing tremendous difficulties. Concurrently, their organizations do not communicate clear and detailed display rules such that the employees tend to learn about emotional labor, either independently via observation of others or via hard-earned experience. In addition to the emotional-rational dichotomy that has been discussed previously, we have identified individualism and personal responsibility as key premises explaining minimal or the absence of explicit display rules, and the ways that individuals learn emotional labor.

KEYWORDS:

• Emotion
• emotional labor
• culture
• global teams
• high tech

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).