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Research Interests

As an industrial/organizational psychologist, Alicia A. Grandey's research focuses on the balance between the employee's experience of stress and emotions and the organization’s needs for performance.  Her primary stream of research is on "emotional labor," where employees manage their emotions as part of the job, specifically in customer service in a variety of settings.  This has taken the form of identifying organizational practices to control emotional displays, studying events like customer aggression toward employees that induce emotional labor, identifying how customers respond to emotional labor (particularly inauthenticity), and when emotional labor is more or less likely to result in stress and good performance.  In this work, Dr. Grandey uses multiple theoretical perspectives (job design, dramaturgy, emotion regulation) and methodological techniques (surveys, experience sampling, lab experiments). Dr. Grandey has also published on the topics of work-family conflict and "family-friendly policies", organizational justice, and gender, racial, and cultural diversity.

 

Recent Publications

Grandey, A., Chi, N-W., Diamond*, J. (in press). Show me the money! Do financial rewards enhance or undermine satisfaction from performing emotional labor?  Personnel Psychology.

Maneotis*, S., Grandey, A., Krauss, A. (in press). Understanding the 'why' as well as the 'how': Service performance s a function of prosocial motives and emotional labor. Human Performance.

Grandey, A., Krannitz*, M., Slezak†, T.  (in press).  We are…More than Football: Three Stories of Identity Threat by Penn State Insiders. Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Perspectives on Science and Practice.
 Grandey, A.,Diefendorff, J.A., & Rupp, D. (2012).  Emotional Labor in the 21stCentury: Diverse Perspectives on Emotion Regulation at Work (Editors). Psychology Press/Routledge: New York, New York.

Groth, M. & Grandey, A.  (2012). From bad to worse: Negative exchange spirals in employee–customer service interactions.  Organizational Psychology Review, 2(3), 208 - 233

Tsai, W., Chi, N., Grandey, A. & Fung, S. (2012). Positive group affective tone and team creativity: negative group affective tone and team trust as boundary conditions. Journal of Organizational Behavior. 33, 638-656.

Grandey, A., Goldberg*, L., & Pugh, S.D. (2012). Why and when do stores with satisfied employees have satisfied customers? The roles of service responsiveness and store busyness.  Journal of Service Research, 14(4), 397-409. 

Grandey, A., Foo*, SC.  Groth, M., & Goodwin, R. (2012). Free to be you and me: A climate of authenticity alleviates burnout from emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 17(1), 1-14.

*denotes student co-author