Giving From the Heart: The Emotion Management of Volunteering Employees

Abstract

This article traces the emotion management practices of a bank’s community of volunteers as managerial control, based on an in-depth case study at a well-known veteran Israeli bank (from the late 1970s until recent years). Since the 1980s, the bank’s employees have been required to take a part in volunteering initiatives considered part of the bank’s CSR strategy. The article demonstrates that the courteous clerk, who was expected to display human and emphatic gestures toward the customers toward the end of the 1970s, was eventually required to redirect those acquired orientations and traits toward the entire community outside the bank branches and clientele.

The study challenges both the positivistic and critical managerial literature that avoids discussing emotion management as a mechanism of control regarding corporate volunteerism.