Subordinates' Locus of Causality and Negative Emotion
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Shen, Chiao-Ling
Abstract
In the past researches of emotion in organization, subordinate’s emotion is often believed to be induced by certain leadership behaviors or work environment. These researches stress the effect of environment and leadership on subordinate’s emotional reaction and ignore the importance of subordinate’s cognitive evaluation mechanism on stimuli. Thus, this study takes a cognitive emotion approach and considers the effect of Chinese culture, social cultivation, and both vertical and horizontal relationship targets on cognitive attribution and emotion, to investigate how subordinate’s locus of causality (internal attribution and external attribution) influences his or her negative emotion (shame, guilt, and anger) when encountering negative work incidents. 80 employees from different industries participated in this study, and their result was analyzed and found that: (a) Subordinates tend to feel more shameful than guilty when encountering negative work incidents; (b) subordinates tend to show more anger than shame and guilt when they have external attribution on negative work incidents; otherwise, they tend to show more shame than anger and guilt; and (c) subordinates are more likely to have shameful reaction when interacting negatively with supervisors than with co-workers. Lastly, contributions and limitations are discussed, and suggestions are provided for future studies and managerial practices in Chinese organizations.
Subjects
attribution
locus of causality
internal- external dimension
shame
guilt
anger
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