Maintaining norms about expressed emotions: the case of bill collectors

Administrative Science Quarterly,  June, 1991  by Robert I. Sutton

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Friendly debtors. The organization relied on socialization, rewards, and punishments to maintain the contingent norm of treating debtors with irritation, even anger. We were told in training not to reciprocate a debtor's kindness with a friendly tone because it signalled that the overdue payment wasn't important and that the threatened negative consequences weren't genuine.

Instead, rather than just using urgency, we were told to get "especially tough with the buddy-buddy types to let them know you are not their friend." Once newcomers began making collection calls, managers and experienced collectors warned them about the risks of dealing with "nice" debtors. While I was working on the phones, several collectors urged me to "get nasty" with debtors who "acted like your friend" because it conveyed that the overdue payment was a serious matter, and even if it seemed likely that a "nice" debtor would pay, such unpleasantness encouraged them to "get off the phone and stop wasting your time." For example, I called a woman who was stuck at home with a broken leg. She seemed pleased to hear from me and started chatting in a warm, friendly way about how she would get around to paying the bill soon and about how boring it was to have a broken leg. I was friendly in return and was enjoying the conversation, until the collector I was sitting with reached over, pressed the mute button, and scolded me: "You've got to get her upset! Say 'Excuse me, but don't you even care about losing your credit card? Don't you care about your credit rating?'" Table 2 and Figure 1 suggest that, despite such expectations, even experienced collectors reported that friendly debtors rarely provoked feelings of irritation or anger; instead, they often felt neutral or even sympathetic toward them. Collectors told me that although they believed that being "too nice" to friendly debtors reduced the chances of getting the money, they sometimes struggled to express the normative irritation. This statement from a collector with more than five years experience is typical: "When I got chummy-chummy with a debtor, he took my kindness for weakness. So you just can't be nice most of the time, or they will never send you the money." I encountered no evidence that managers or experienced collectors taught newcomers that they should feel irritated or angry toward friendly debtors. Instead, in addition to teaching this norm and supporting it with praise and criticism, newcomers were taught cognitive appraisals to help them gain emotional detachment from friendly debtors. For example, while I engaged in a conversation with a friendly debtor, the collector I was sitting with wrote me notes including: "Start giving her grief" and "Get mean." He told me after the call, "Don't think of her as a nice person. Think of her as a bill you've got to collect." In other words, it would be easier to feign required emotions if I viewed the call as impersonal.