Blake E. Ashforth and Ronald H. Humphrey (1995), Human Relations 48(2):97–125 — DOI-10.1177/001872679504800201
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s abstract, not read. What follows is what the abstract says.
- Work is “saturated with emotion”, but research has neglected everyday emotions in organisational life. Scholars and practitioners often treat emotionality as “the antithesis of rationality”, and so take a pejorative view of emotion.
- That view has produced four institutionalised mechanisms for regulating the experience and expression of emotion at work: (1) neutralizing, (2) buffering, (3) prescribing and (4) normalizing.
- Against it, the authors argue that emotionality and rationality are “interpenetrated”, that emotions are “an integral and inseparable part of organizational life”, and that they are often functional for the organisation. Motivation, leadership and group dynamics are the applications.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, with four works on emotion in
groups and organisations. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no
instruction for machine-learning practice. Deferred because it was not
read.
Its place in the batch is as the field-founding argument that emotion in organisations is worth studying at all. Barsade (LIT-706) cites it for using “emotion” as a broad label for subjective feeling, and her paper is one answer to its call to study everyday emotions at work. Von Scheve & Ismer (LIT-696) do not cite it. Their “culture and shared knowledge” mechanisms, feeling and display rules after Hochschild, are the family the four regulating mechanisms belong to: an organisation’s norms making its members’ emotions converge, or keeping them out of view.
Two links to the record’s emotion holdings can be stated from the abstract alone, and a reading would test both.
- The record’s regulation literature. Gross (LIT-554) treats emotion regulation as something individuals do to their own emotions, and Frijda (LIT-540) argues it is mostly one emotion checking another. The four mechanisms here are regulation done by an institution to its members’ emotions, a level neither of those addresses.
- Emotion and rationality. The claim that the two are “interpenetrated” is the organisational version of a claim the record holds in Damasio (LIT-384) and Frijda (LIT-540): emotion is part of practical reason, not its opponent.
Priority for a reading: low to medium. It is a review and position paper, and its central claims are in the abstract. A reading would add what each regulating mechanism is, and the group-dynamics section, which is where it would bear on collective emotion.