ABSTRACT
Suffering at work—in the form of burnout, compassion fatigue, emotional abuse, and emotive dissonance—has motivated a wealth of research and theorizing on emotion in the field of organizational communication. This chapter reviews macro discourses of rationality and masculinity as well as organizational feeling rules that discipline workplace emotion; reviews the various forms emotional communication takes in organizations, via phenomena such as emotional labor, emotional intelligence, and workplace bullying; and analyzes the ways that employees resist, reify, and transcend emotion rules and emotional constructions through humor, social support, bystander intervention, interactional resilience, and more. The chapter closes by synthesizing how this research contributes to a structuration model of emotion and organizational communication. Auxiliary materials illustrate key concepts through discussion questions and a mini case analysis of the emotion-charged organizational environment of an airport.
