Maintaining norms about expressed emotions: the case of bill collectors

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

Socialization. Table 1, above, shows that five of the seven data sources indicated that socialization practices were used to maintain the urgency norm. The handbook for new collectors indicated that an "urgent" and "concerned" style was expected from bucket two onward. This norm was also made explicit in training when my class was told: We are proud of the quality of our customer service, and we insist that you protect the company's good name by being courteous to customers.

But that doesn't mean we are friendly doormats. Let them hear the firmness in your voice. Tell them "Mr. Smith, it is imperative that we resolve this matter today." Supervisors and experienced collectors coached newcomers to use urgency. A supervisor told me that my tone was too tentative, and I had to learn to "talk like you mean business." The collector I sat with my first day on the phones scolded me (in an intense and somewhat irritated tone, of course) after I failed to get a promise to pay from a debtor: "Come on, don't be such a wimp. You've got to be more intense--where is that urgency in your voice?" Collectors' socialization led them to internalize this norm and thus experience as well as express arousal and mild irritation. After a week of training and a week on the phones, I found that, rather than the sympathy and fear I felt at first, I reacted to most debtors with feelings of intensity and vague irritation. I heard similar assertions from experienced collectors and their supervisors. Several forces may have led collectors to align their feelings with this norm. First, because new collectors were required to convey urgency again and again, there was incentive for learning to feel aroused and a bit irritated to avoid the tension of emotive dissonance. Second, an open office design meant that collectors were surrounded by intense and slightly irritated people. New collectors may have used these behaviors as cues about the feelings they should experience when talking to debtors. Classic laboratory research on emotion (Schacter and Singer, 1962), field research on hysterical contagion (Colligan, Pennebaker, and Murphy, 1982), and sociological theory on emotion (Franks and McCarthy, 1989) all indicate that people rely on emotions expressed by similar others to learn which emotions they ought to be feeling. Third, as Table 2 indicated, although there was variation in debtors' emotional reactions to collection calls, the typical debtor responded with mild irritation and mild anxiety. Collectors may have responded to such mildly unpleasant people with their own feelings of irritation because--just like debtors who faced unpleasant collectors--they found interactions with people expressing negative emotion to be aversive. As a result, in many calls, the urgency norm may have been maintained partly by the mutually reinforcing feelings of both collector and debtor. Finally, internalization of the urgency norm was accentuated by explicit teaching of feeling rules (Hochchild, 1983), which are norms about emotions that ought to be felt. An experienced collector once told me "get yourself feeling a little more hyper and a little mad" before making a call. These feeling rules were also conveyed indirectly by statements made by veteran collectors about their inner feelings, which provided new collectors with information about the emotions they ought to be experiencing. Collectors often reported feeling "wound-up and a little pissed-off" on the phone, or words to that effect. It is difficult to determine the extent to which managers intentionally relied on these four forces to align members' inner feelings with the urgency norm. Yet, intentional or not, these forces appeared to induce feelings in collectors that helped the organization maintain this norm.