Need for Procedural Justice in emotion suppressive interaction: The moderating effect of closeness with supervisor

Suppressing negative emotion expression can improve interpersonal harmony and often be seen as an emotional display rule in the workgroup or organization. However, emotion suppression would minimize emotion cues and raise uncertainty during interpersonal interactions. Studies showed that employees would be more concern about justice information in an ambiguous situation. Moreover, Chinese culture values guanxi, the relationship between people, and relationship itself could provide interaction information and norm. That is, people would feel more uncertain when interacting with someone they are not familiar with. Therefore, this study examined the relationship between employees’ perception of negative emotion display rule in the workplace and employees’ need for procedural justice, and explored the moderation effect of the closeness to the supervisor of the employee. Using a sample of 225 employees from Taiwanese organizations, the result indicated that employees’ perception of emotion display rule of suppressing negative emotions were positively associated with employees’ need for procedural justice. Also, the close relationship with supervisor moderated the association between negative emotion display rule and employees’ need for procedural justice. Compared to high closeness with supervisor, the positive relationship between negative emotion display rule and employees’ need for procedural justice were stronger when the level of closeness to supervisor was low. The limitation and future directions were discussed.

Keywords: Need for procedural justice, emotional display rule, suppress negative emotion expression, and closeness to supervisor.