Hey boss! Are you doing okay? Overcoming rank-based norms for emotional acknowledgment improves team performance

Emotional acknowledgment, verbally recognizing others’ emotions, improves interpersonal outcomes, yet is surprisingly rare in work teams. To understand who in a team is most likely to engage in emotional acknowledgment, we examine how prescriptive norms tied to hierarchical rank shape team members’ responses to one another’s emotions. We propose and show that higher-ranked members engage in more emotional acknowledgment toward lower-ranked members than vice versa because norms more strongly prescribe emotional acknowledgment for those higher, rather than lower, in rank. Additionally, we show that when lower-ranked members positively deviate from prescriptive norms by acknowledging higher-ranked members’ emotions, higher-ranked members reciprocate by increasing their own emotional acknowledgment toward lower-ranked members beyond normatively expected baseline levels. This helps their teams develop positively deviant emotional cultures, and, as we show, elevates team performance beyond that of teams that adhere to prescriptive rank-based norms for emotional acknowledgment. Three pre-registered, multi-method studies, including a team experiment and a two-wave field study, support our hypotheses. Overall, our findings highlight the surprising impact of lower-ranked members in shaping team emotional dynamics and performance.