How Display Rules Influence Turnover in Healthcare Teams and the Moderating Role of Team Negative Affective Tone

Team display rules are expressive norms shared by team members about how to positively impact a customer's perception of service quality and satisfaction. For frontline employees' working in teams, however, the costs and benefits of team display rules are less clear as empirical links to objective, behavioral outcomes, such as turnover, are rare. In a study of 442 healthcare professionals, working within 72 teams in a large children’s hospital, we investigate the effects of positive team display rules (i.e., shared expectations among team members to express positive emotions) and negative team display rules (i.e., shared expectations among team members to suppress negative emotions) on time-lagged objective voluntary turnover. We found that positive team display rules prompted retention, while negative team display rules reduced psychological attachment (i.e., affective commitment) and increased voluntary turnover 12 months later. Team negative affective tone (i.e., negative emotions associated with different healthcare team contexts) amplified the detrimental effects of negative team display rules. Overall, this study highlights the important and nuanced effects of the socioemotional context of service teams, in particular, the consequential influence of team display rules on FLEs turnover behavior in a critical service context, that is, healthcare.