Maintaining norms about expressed emotions: the case of bill collectors

Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1991 by Robert I. Sutton

Extremely anxious debtors. Collectors were often discouraged from getting "too chummy" with debtors. But managers expected collectors to treat extremely anxious debtors with warmth, especially if they were first-time debtors who had paid bills promptly in the past. The justification was that because such debtors were sufficiently aroused and worried, the collector's task was to calm them enough so they could process information about how to pay the bill.

Collectors also were told by trainers, supervisors, and coworkers to be kind, because such people were loyal customers. While observing in bucket two, I listened to Tom, one of the collectors, speak to a woman who sounded terrified that her credit rating would suffer. Tom was very sweet to her. After the call he said to me, "You've got to be nice to folks like that. They want to pay their bills." He showed me that her payment record indicated that, as the debtor had claimed, she had never been late or missed a payment before. Most collectors felt warmly toward extremely anxious debtors who had histories of paying bills on time. This norm was easy to maintain because, once it was taught, most collectors only had to remember to turn off the usual urgency and to convey genuine warmth. Although the other display rules were evident across all six buckets and recovery, this norm was only evident in buckets two and three. There appear to be two reasons for this pattern. First, by the time debtors had missed payments for several months, they had been subjected to so many collection calls that they rarely felt extreme anxiety about the overdue bill or about dealing with a bill collector. Second, even if debtors in later buckets responded with extreme anxiety, they had such poor payment histories that collectors were not expected to respond with warmth because such angst was viewed as "just the same old act to get some sympathy."