It’s about how employees feel! examining the impact of emotional culture on employee–organization relationships

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of emotional culture on the quality of employee–organization relationships (EORs). To understand the nuances of the influence of positive and negative emotional cultures on employee relational outcomes, this study specifically examined four fundamental emotional cultures, namely, joy, love, fear and sadness, in the cultivation of EORs. Further, as more recent emotional connotations of culture delve into the connections between employees’ fundamental need for psychological satisfaction and business success, likewise, this study proposes employees’ psychological need satisfaction as a potential mediator that explains how emotional culture influences employee–organization relational outcomes.

To test the hypothesized model, the authors conducted an online survey on a random sample of 509 employees working in 19 diverse industry sectors in a one-week period in February 2017, with the assistance of a premier global provider of survey services, Survey Sampling International. To test the hypothesized model, structural equation modeling analysis was employed using AMOS 24.0 software.

Results indicated that joy, happiness, excitement, companionate love, affection and warmth could meet employees’ psychological need for mutual respect, care, connection and interdependence within the organization. Such culture contributed to employees’ feelings of trust, satisfaction, mutual control and commitment toward the organization. By contrast, employees in organizations with a dispirited, downcast and sad emotional culture were less inclined to develop quality relationships with the organization. Employees in organizations where the emotional culture was fearful, anxious, tense or scared were less likely to satisfy their psychological need for relatedness.

This study is among one of the earliest attempts to theorize and operationalize organizational emotional culture, which fills the research gap in decades of organizational culture research that focused predominantly on the cognitive aspect. Also, this study expands the thriving relationship management literature, in particular, employee relationship management research by showing the positive impact of emotional culture of joy and love and negative impact of emotional culture of sadness on employee relational outcomes.