Hi everybody, I'm Catenya McHenry Communications Director here at the
McCombs School of Business and you are joining us today on our Big Ideas show
where we take a deeper look into faculty research happening here at
the McCombs School of Business. I am excited about our guest today who
is Andrew Brodsky, he is assistant management professor here
at the McCombs School of Business, and I'm really excited to talk to him about his
new research about communication and emotions
which is very exciting because it's what we do every day, so
Andrew welcome to the program it's good to see you!
Great, thanks for having me on! Yes, absolutely!
So we're talking about two of your papers today they're similar in nature
when it comes to the topic so I first want to talk about
your first paper which is called Virtual Surface Acting and Workplace
Interactions: Choosing the Best Technology to Fit the
Task, and really this has a lot to do with
the emotions or lack thereof due to COVID which has forced us to work at
home and how emotion is sometimes
forced in a situation and sometimes emotions are absent in our communication,
so can you talk a little bit more about that paper.
Sure, so this topic about emotional labor is this idea that we have to be
um we have to have certain emotions that we display at work.
You know I first became interested in the topic actually long before my PhD
when I was working at Hollywood Video and one of the things they had us do is
you know if someone brought back a DVD and it's clear they broke it there's like
peanut butter on it you know you still have to smile and apologize on behalf of
Hollywood Video
for the broken DVD. Obviously they're
no longer business but this is something that's common to
pretty much every job this idea of service with a smile
and it's not just happy emotions there's also sometimes you have to display
anger, you have to display sadness there are all these things about these context
appropriate motions that you need to display for your job
even if you're not feeling them. Oftentimes maybe you're really stressed
due to what's going on with COVID or your spouse's job but you still have
to come into work and you know be excited about what your subordinates are
doing even if your mind is filled with this kind of stress.
And for me, I was interested in uh studying that and
with particular interest in you know how does this work virtually.
You know when we're face-to-face we have to force the smile, right, you know does
it go better or is it worse in email versus face-to-face.
Yeah, it's a very interesting topic because
obviously being in communications is something you think about
and study all the time not just your emotions but
sometimes verbal communication and non-verbal communication and what that
means and so it's really interesting to read
your paper and and think about the things we've had to
do because we do them virtually, so as you
as you continue to research this topic what are some of the other things you
found? Do you find that people are more stressed? And are you,
do you find that that it takes a lot more for people to display emotions
because they're not feeling that happiness or that that joy on the
inside? Does it put more stress on the person?
Sure, so you know this first paper focuses on you know
what we call like the interpersonal outcomes of emotional labor.
So the thing about emotional labor is you know when you're authentic
or when you display emotions that are perceived as authentic you know you're
really smiling the customer thinks the customer thinks you're happy it goes
over great, but if a customer or anyone else a
coworker a subordinate severe superior thinks you're being inauthentic
even if the reason that you're being inauthentic
is because you have to for the situation you have to for part of your job,
you end up being punished being inauthentic can destroy trust,
it can hurt customer loyalty on the organizational side,
if employees are inauthentic it can hurt profits you know there's a lot of
stories now about you know CEOs who've done
apologies that have come off as inauthentic
, right , so in this paper I tackled the question of, you know,
if you know you're gonna have to be inauthentic here and there's lots of
good reasons why you might have to be , you know, you're stressed otherwise but
you need to be happy here which medium is best? And
in the paper there's kind of two full findings, one is if you're being
authentic you want to do the richest medium
possible so that's like face to face, video conferencing if you're truly being
authentic but you know if you know you're stressed
if you know you're just not feeling the motion
but you do have to display it, for instance maybe you
are, you know, as a negative example you have to, unfortunately, fire an employee
who you know has been performing poorly but you still want to be really
supportive of them and say nice things to them even though you're
somewhat relieved this employee is off your team. In that case, you know I find
that telephone or audio, this kind of middle richness communication is
actually best. And the idea being that when you're
faking it you don't want to go face to face
because there's this emotional leakage people often pick up on unconscious cues.
you know when I interviewed and surveyed a bunch of people they said
that email was probably best when you're faking it
but i find that's not the case. I find that, yes, while email
masks this kind of emotional leakage that comes through
it's actually just seen as really inauthentic mode of communication
altogether. So telephone's like this sweet spot
where it's not seen as an inauthentic motive like email,
but on the other side of that it doesn't give too much away like face-to-face
communication or video conferencing. Yeah, and that's interesting because I
think people are using the phone less over I don't know, since smartphones
became what they are, and texting became what it is, so that
that's a really interesting discovery. Well, let's talk about your second paper
which is a similar tie-in to your first one
the second one's called Beyond the Emoticon: Are There Unintentional Cues
of Emotion in Email. So you talked a little bit about that
just now, but can you describe more about what
that means when it comes to just email and emoticons. Sure, so this is a
project I did with a Doctoral Student Haley Blunden at
Harvard Business School and approaching this we were interested
in you know do we send more emotions than we realize?
So ,you know, face-to-face a lot of the way we interpret emotions is through
non-verbal behavior. And a lot of that nonverbal behavior
isn't even intentional on the part of the person communicating, whereas in
email we often, you know, the way we show
emotions is through word choice or punctuation
and you know an exclamation mark or emoticons, but the thing is all those
cues are really intentional, right, you don't accidentally put a smiley face
emoticon in your email. So we were curious if there were any
unintentional cues of emotion in email, and what we find in the paper across six
studies is that email typos actually convey emotion.
Now, they don't convey a specific emotion like happiness or sadness.
What they are is they're kind of an emotional amplifier, it's like sticking
your fist up in the air ,you know, that can mean you're really
proud, really happy, really angry but what it does is sticking your
fists in the air it kind of amplifies the emotions that you're displaying and
in the same way we find that when there's an angry email typos make
the email seem angrier when there's a happy email typos make
the emails seem happier.
Interesting, I had no idea that typos meant that much and it's funny
because you see a lot of people in their emails on their phone where
they excuse themselves because of the typos.
And i guess it's just one of those conscious unconscious things that
that you do. Yeah, you know it's interesting, part of what makes this such
an interesting emotional cue is this idea that you know most of the
cues in email are cheap, right, someone puts an emoticon in there do you really
believe in that emoticon? Particularly in a
situation where you know you're not sure if they're being authentic or not.
The idea about typos is they're kind of a costly cue,
and what we mean by costly cue is that typos really make you look
dumb. We actually show that they make you look a lot less intelligent,
so you'd be unlikely to fake typos. So as a result
we would predict, although we don't explicitly study this, that they would
tend to be more believable because they are more costly and
because they are seen as unintentional, and the kind of
idea behind why these occur is that, you know,
your emotions overwhelm you so much that you're not thinking about what you're
doing ,and that's how the people on the other
side interpret it is oh the person was so emotional that you know
they must have that must be why they made the typos there.
Yeah, and we actually have one other interesting finding in there
We find that in emotional emails typos are forgiven a little bit more
than in unemotional emails. Interesting, yeah so,
Is it the reader or the writer that interprets how much emotion is in the
email? So we only look at the reader, the
recipients, yeah, so we're looking at how recipients interpret emotions there.
We see that recipients kind of see a typo and then
it amplifies whatever other emotion they perceived in a message.
Yeah, and their idea is they're kind of looking for something some reasoning
some attribution for the typo, yeah, so when there's a motion they attach it to
emotion. When there's no emotion they attach it
only purely to the person being generally less intelligent or rushed or
something else , so that's part of the reason why typos
are forgiven a little bit more in emotional emails is that
they tend to say oh it's because they were emotional so you can get away with
them a little bit more. Right, how should people continue to go
forward in making sure that they're emotionally authentic
in their communications as we may be in this virtual situation for a little bit
longer than we expected. So you know the one key takeaway that I
have here is, you know, be thoughtful and mindful about the choices
you're making, how you're communicating. Be mindful about, you know, how's the
medium you're choosing gonna send information to another person, you
know, try and put yourself in their head and think about well how are they
going to interpret this as opposed to how do i expect someone else to
interpret this? And yeah, so the ideas here just really
think about what you do as opposed to just
work on auto be automatic as you're writing these things. Yeah,
that's great advice. Well, I think we'll end it right there. Thank you so much
Andrew for joining us today! This has been such a great conversation! I could
talk to you probably another hour or so just on this topic of communication, so
thank you again for your time, and your insight, and your research, and
and thank you for joining us on our
program today. Great, thanks for hosting me today! You're welcome!
If you want to read the paper we have links to both of Andrew's papers in
this video so feel free to click on either of those to read more in depth
about his research. Thank you so much for joining us today on our Big Ideas show. We
will see you next time!