Emotions at Work
PRESENTED BY:
NUR HASANAH, SE, MSC
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, you should be able
to:
1. Differentiate between emotions and moods.
2. Discuss whether emotions are rational and what
functions they serve.
3. Describe the validity of potential sources of emotions
and moods.
4. Show the impact emotional labor has on employees.
5. Describe affective events theory and its applications.
6. Contrast the evidence for and against the
existence of emotional intelligence.
7. Identify strategies for emotion regulation and
their likely effects.
8. Apply concepts about emotions and moods to
specific OB issues.
WHAT ARE EMOTIONS AND MOODS?
There are three terms that are closely intertwined:
affect, emotions, and moods.
Affect is a generic term that covers a broad
range of feelings people experience, including
both emotions and moods.
Emotions are intense feelings directed at
someone or something.
Moods are less intense feelings than
emotions that often arise without a specific
event acting as a stimulus.
THE FUNCTION OF EMOTIONS AND MOODS
Organizational behaviorists have been finding that
emotions can be critical to an effectively functioning
workplace.
Let’s discuss two critical areas—rationality and
ethicality—in which emotions can enhance
performance.
Do Emotions Make Us Irrational?
Research is increasingly indicating that emotions are
critical to rational thinking.
Brain injury studies in particular suggest we must
have the ability to experience emotions to be
rational. Why? Because our emotions provide a
context for how we understand the world around us.
For instance, a recent study indicated that
individuals in a negative mood are better able to
discern truthful information than people in a happy
mood.
Do Emotions Make Us Ethical?
Numerous studies suggest that moral judgments are
largely based on feelings rather than on cognitions.
However, we tend to see our moral boundaries as
logical and reasonable, not as emotional. We
therefore must be careful to objectively analyze our
ethical decisions.
SOURCES OF EMOTIONS AND MOODS
Potential Influences on Moods and Emotions:
1. personality
2. time of the day
3. day of the week
4. weather
5. stress
6. social activities
7. sleep
8. exercise
9. age
10. sex
EMOTIONAL LABOR
emotional labor, an employee’s expression of
organizationally desired emotions during
interpersonal transactions at work.
Emotional labor is a key component of effective job
performance.
We expect flight attendants to be cheerful, funeral
directors to be sad, and doctors emotionally neutral.
But emotional labor is relevant to almost every job.
At the least your managers expect you to be
courteous, not hostile, in your interactions with
coworkers.
The way we experience an emotion is obviously not
always the same as the way we show it. To analyze
emotional labor, we divide emotions into felt or
displayed emotions.
Felt emotions are our actual emotions. In
contrast, displayed emotions are those that
the organization requires workers to show and
considers appropriate in a given job. They’re not
innate; they’re learned, and they may or may not
coincide with felt emotions.
Displaying fake emotions requires us to suppress real
ones. Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and
emotional expressions in response to display rules. A
worker who smiles at a customer even when he
doesn’t feel like it is surface acting.
Deep acting is trying to modify our true inner
feelings based on display rules. Surface acting deals
with displayed emotions, and deep acting deals with
felt emotions.
Displaying emotions we don’t really feel can be
exhausting. When employees have to project one
emotion while feeling another, this disparity is called
emotional dissonance.
Emotional dissonance is like cognitive
dissonance, except that emotional dissonance concerns
feelings rather than thinking. Bottled-up feelings of
frustration, anger, and resentment can lead to emotional
exhaustion.
Long term emotional dissonance is a predictor for job
burnout, declines in job performance, and lower job
satisfaction.
Research in the Netherlands and Belgium indicated that
surface acting is stressful to employees, while
mindfulness (learning to objectively evaluate our
emotional situation in the moment, akin to deep acting)
is beneficial to employee well-being.
It is also important to give employees who engage in
surface displays a chance to relax and recharge.
A study that looked at how cheerleading instructors
spent their breaks from teaching found those who used
the time to rest and relax were more effective after their
breaks.
Instructors who did chores during their breaks were only
about as effective after their break as they were before.
AFFECTIVE EVENTS THEORY
Model called affective events theory (AET)
demonstrates that employees react
emotionally to things that happen to them at
work, and this reaction influences their job
performance and satisfaction.
In the service sector, encourage positive displays of
emotion, which make customers feel more positive
and thus improve customer service interactions and
negotiations.
Managers who understand the role of emotions and
moods will significantly improve their ability to
explain and predict their coworkers’ and employees’
behavior.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Emotional intelligence (EI) is a person’s
ability to (1) perceive emotions in the self and
others, (2) understand the meaning of these
emotions, and (3) regulate one’s emotions
accordingly in a cascading model.
Several studies suggest EI plays an important role in
job performance. However, EI has been a
controversial concept in OB, with supporters and
detractors.
The Case for EI
INTUITIVE APPEALIntuition suggests that people
who can detect emotions in others, control their own
emotions, and handle social interactions well have
an advantage in the business world.
EI PREDICTS CRITERIA THAT
MATTEREvidence suggests a high level of EI
means a person will perform well on the job.
EI IS BIOLOGICALLY BASED There is evidence
that EI is genetically influenced, further supporting
the idea that it measures a real underlying biological
factor
The Case Against EI
EI RESEARCHERS DO NOT AGREE ON
DEFINITIONS To many researchers, it’s not clear
what EI is, because researchers use different
definitions of it.
EI CAN’T BE MEASURED The measures of EI are
diverse, and researchers have not subjected them to
as much rigorous study as they have measures of
personality and general intelligence.
EI IS NOTHING BUT PERSONALITY WITH A
DIFFERENT LABEL Some critics argue that
because EI is so closely related to intelligence and
personality, once you control for these factors, it has
nothing unique to offer.
To some extent, researchers have resolved this issue
by noting that EI is a construct partially determined
by traits like cognitive intelligence,
conscientiousness, and neuroticism, so it makes
sense that EI is correlated with these characteristics
EMOTION REGULATION
The central idea behind emotion regulation is to
identify and modify the emotions you feel.
Recent research suggests that emotion management
ability is a strong predictor of task performance for
some jobs and organizational citizenship behaviors.
Studies indicate that effective emotion regulation
techniques include acknowledging rather than
suppressing our emotional responses to situations,
and reevaluating events after they occur.
Another technique with potential is venting.
Research shows that open expression of emotions
can be helpful to the individual, as opposed to
keeping emotions “bottled up.” Caution must be
exercised, though, because venting, or expressing
your frustration outwardly, touches other people.
OB APPLICATIONS OF EMOTIONS AND
MOODS
Our understanding of emotions and moods can
impact the selection process, decision making,
creativity, motivation, leadership, negotiation,
customer service, job attitudes, deviant workplace
behavior, and safety.
Selection
Research indicates that employers should consider
EI a factor in selecting employees, especially for jobs
that demand a high degree of social interaction.
More employers have started to use EI measures in
their hiring processes and are finding high-scoring
EI employees outperform low-scoring employees for
recruiting and sales positions.
It also makes sense for managers to select members
who are predisposed to positive moods for teamwork
because positive moods transmit from team member
to team member.
Decision Making
Moods and emotions have effects on decision making
that managers should understand.
Positive emotions and moods seem to help people
make sound decisions. Positive emotions
furthermore enhance problem-solving skills, so
positive people find better solutions to problems.
OB researchers continue to debate the role of
negative emotions and moods in decision making.
Although one major study suggested that depressed
people reach more accurate judgments.
Creativity
Creativity is influenced by emotions and moods, but
there are two schools of thought on the relationship.
Much research suggests that people in good moods tend
to be more creative than people in bad moods.
People in good moods produce more ideas and more
options, and others think their ideas are original. They
are more flexible and open in their thinking, which may
explain why they’re more creative.
Other researchers do not believe a positive mood
enhances creativity. They argue that when people are in
positive moods, they may relax.
Motivation
Several studies have highlighted the importance of
moods and emotions on motivation.
One study found that a group in a good mood was
more motivated in a problem-solving task than a
group in a neutral mood.
Another study found that giving people performance
feedback—whether real or fake—influenced their
mood, which then influenced their motivation.
Leadership
Research indicates that in leadership, putting people
in a good mood makes good sense.
Leaders who focus on inspirational goals generate
greater optimism and enthusiasm in employees,
which leads to more positive social interactions with
coworkers and customers.
A study with Taiwanese military participants further
indicates that by sharing emotions, leaders can
inspire positive emotions in their followers that lead
to higher task performance.
Negotiation
Several studies suggest that a negotiator who feigns
anger has an advantage over her opponent. Why?
Because when a negotiator shows anger, the
opponent concludes the negotiator has conceded all
she can and so he gives in.
However, anger should be used selectively in
negotiation: angry negotiators who have less
information or less power than their opponents have
significantly worse outcomes
Customer Service
Workers’ emotional states influence customer
service, which influences levels of repeat business
and customer satisfaction.
This is primarily due to emotional contagion—
the “catching” of emotions from others. When
someone experiences positive emotions and laughs
and smiles at you, you tend to respond positively. Of
course, the opposite is true as well.
Job Attitudes
There is good news and bad news about the relationship
between moods and job attitudes.
The good news is that it appears that a positive mood at work
can spill over to your off-work hours, and a negative mood at
work can be restored to a positive mood after a break.
Several studies have shown people who had a good day at
work tend to be in a better mood at home that evening, and
vice versa.
Other research has found that although people do emotionally
take their work home with them, by the next day the effect is
usually gone.
The bad news is that the moods of your household may
interfere.
Deviant Workplace Behaviors
Evidence suggests that people who feel negative
emotions are more likely than others to engage in short-
term deviant behavior at work such as gossiping or
searching the Internet.
Of concern, a recent study in Pakistan found that anger
correlated with more aggressive counterproductive
behaviors such as abuse against others and production
deviance, while sadness did not.
Neither anger nor sadness predicted workplace
withdrawal, which suggests that managers need to take
employee expressions of anger seriously because
employees may stay with an organization and continue to
act aggressively toward others.
Safety and Injury at Work
Research relating negative affectivity to increased
injuries at work suggests employers might improve
health and safety (and reduce costs) by ensuring
workers aren’t engaged in potentially dangerous
activities when they’re in a bad mood.
Bad moods can contribute to injury at work in
several ways
SUMMARY
Emotions and moods are similar in that both are
affective in nature. But they’re also different—moods are
more general than emotions.
Events impact emotions and moods. The time of day,
stressful situations, and sleep patterns are some of the
factors that influence emotions and moods.
OB research on emotional labor, affective events theory,
emotional intelligence, and emotional regulation helps us
understand how people deal with emotions.
Emotions and moods have proven relevant for virtually
every work outcome, with implications for effective
managerial practices.
IMPLICATIONS FOR MANAGERS
Recognize that emotions are a natural part of the
workplace and good management does not mean
creating an emotion-free environment.
To foster effective decision making, creativity, and
motivation in employees, model positive emotions
and moods as much as is authentically possible.
Provide positive feedback to increase the positivity of
the workplace.
