FWO travel grant for a short stay abroad in research into emotions in family firm top management teams from 08/04 to 05/05/2019 at the Research Institute for Family Business at WU Wien (R-9616)

The topic of my PhD is related to emotions in family firms, a topic that still suffers from a lack of profound, empirical evidence (Shepherd, 2016). I specifically focus on emotional dissonance, which is defined as the phenomenon that occurs when there is a conflict between the emotions an individual experiences and the emotions he or she expresses to conform to display rules (Abraham, 1998). It is a construct that has its origins in research on service contexts, where it has been known for a few decades that employees change the expression of their emotions, or in other words hide or fake emotions, when they interact with customers, patients etc. It has been proven to have multiple negative consequences, such as a decrease in job satisfaction, a higher turnover intention and a higher level of emotional exhaustion. Recently, authors have come to an agreement that organization members also adjust their emotions in intra-organizational interactions. This inspired me to look further into emotional dissonance in the context of family firms. There are assumptions in existing literature that emotional dissonance is at least as likely to occur in family firms as in non-family firms, due to the overlap of the business system and the family system, with both of these systems requiring different emotions to be expressed or hidden (Labaki, Michael-Tsabari, & Zachary, 2013; Rau, 2013). However, there is no in-depth research on the topic yet. One of the main research areas I will look into, is the influence of familiness on this phenomenon. Therefore, I will collaborate with the Research Institute for Family Business of WU Wien

Keywords:emotional dissonance, familiness, familyfirms

Disciplines:Business management, Organisation and management theory, Organisational management