Hope collection

How can understanding emotional responses during a crisis help small business owners better manage their employees, customers, and businesses?

Practical Advice/Tips for Practitioners

Recognise emotional complexity 
Acknowledge employees’ mixed emotions to effectively support them, reducing stress, fostering resilience, and enhancing overall morale during uncertain or rapidly changing conditions.

• Engage in alter-emotional labour 
  Actively manage employees’ and customers' emotions by clearly communicating safety measures, demonstrating empathy, and providing emotional reassurance to maintain trust and organisational stability.

• Encourage emotional reflexivity 
  Promote awareness and reflection on emotional responses to crisis among staff, facilitating adaptive decision-making, enhancing coping strategies, and reducing anxiety or negative outcomes.

• Leverage positive emotions strategically
  Harness positive emotions such as gratitude, hope, and solidarity among employees and customers to improve loyalty, cohesion, and sustained motivation during challenging times.

• Build collective emotional support networks
  Foster emotional solidarity by encouraging shared experiences and mutual support among local businesses, enhancing communal resilience and collaborative coping with crisis-related impacts.

Abstract

To the extent that emotions are noticed in consideration of crisis they are typically thought to be negative, linked to the disruptive consequences of crisis. Based on semi-structured in‐depth interviews the article shows that crisis precipitates not only negative but also positive emotions and that the complex of emotional experiences that emerge in the COVID pandemic crisis play a significant role in the transformation of outlook and practice persons undergo during crisis. Situating the study of crisis in an emotions‐interaction framework the article identifies the properties of relational emotionality inherent in experience of crisis, revealing the nature of ambivalent emotions and identifying other‐directed emotional labour. Crisis is not only a social relational but also a collective phenomenon through which actors are embedded in emotional constellations. A study of crisis in relation to emotion contributes to sociological understanding of not only crisis but also emotion.

Full paper access

Qi, Xiaoying. (2024). Emotion in and through crisis. British Journal of Sociology. 75(5), pp. 908-921.

Contact the researcher

Associate Professor Xiaoying Qi
Xiaoying.Qi@acu.edu.au

Learn more about Associate Professor Xiaoying Qi’s research