Responding to emotions in China: Gender differences and the emotion-job outcome relationship

The role of emotion in the workplace has received increasing research attention in the past three decades. Yet there is relatively little direct evidence showing the relationships between discrete emotions and employee attitudinal and behavioral outcomes such as commitment, satisfaction, performance and citizenship behaviors. In this study, empirical data were collected to show that jealousy, joy, and fear experienced in the workplace impact employee outcomes. Furthermore, due to Chinese cultural factors that encourage females’ responses to jealousy, women are expected to be less ambitious with respect to work achievements in reacting to jealousy. Thus the jealousy-job outcomes relationships will be stronger and the joy-job outcomes relationships will be weaker for Chinese females as opposed to the male employees. This expectation receives some support from a sample of 174 male-female pairs of employees and their supervisors in China.