The study of emotions in organizational contexts has garnered increasing attention from scholars and practitioners over the past few decades.
Most of them refer to emotions as complex reactions to stimuli involving physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experiences. Accordingly emotions shall be intended as discrete, intense yet short-lived experiences, while moods as longer and more diffuse, oftentimes lacking awareness of the eliciting stimulus.
Research on emotions has employed a variety of methodological approaches, including ethnographic studies, narrative analyses, survey, and experience sampling methods. Below is an overview of select articles (both theoretical and empirical) that have greatly advanced our understanding of the nature and role of emotions in organizational contexts.
Elfenbein, H. A. (2007). Emotion in organizations: a review and theoretical integration. Academy of management annals, 1(1), 315-386.
This article offers a review of the research literature on emotion in organizations that chronologically develops along the emotion process, as currently conceived by psychologists. This process begins with an organizational actor who is exposed to an eliciting stimulus, registers that stimulus for its meaning, and experiences a feeling state and physiological changes, with downstream consequences for behaviors and cognition. These downstream consequences can result in externally visible behaviors and cues (e.g., facial expressions) that become, in turn, eliciting stimuli for interaction partners. Throughout this process emotional regulation can occur and might incorporate micro-level differences as well as macro-level norms.
Rafaeli, A., & Sutton, R. I. (1991). Emotional contrast strategies as means of social influence: Lessons from criminal interrogators and bill collectors. Academy of management journal, 34(4), 749-775.
The authors conduct a matched-samples inductive, qualitative study of occupations whose members are expected to wield influence over uncooperative targets-namely, criminal investigators and bill collectors. They found study participants conveying a mix of expressed emotions, both positive and negative, in order to influence others. This emotional contrast strategy, often popularized by the label “good cop, bad cop” exposes the target to both threatening and friendly stimuli. The resulting perceptual contrast that follows tends to accentuate the construed positiveness of displayed positive emotions and the construed negativeness of displayed negative emotions. Their findings extend scholarly understandings of how expressed emotions, particularly when contrasting, can be used as tools of social influence in organizational settings.
Morris, J. A., & Feldman, D. C. (1996). The dimensions, antecedents, and consequences of emotional labor. Academy of management review, 21(4), 986-1010.
In an era characterized by growing organizational efforts to direct and control how employees present themselves and display emotions to their clients. This article advances a nuanced conceptualization of this phenomenon, commonly referred to as emotional labor. Emotional labor exhibits four distinct dimensions: frequency of appropriate emotional display, attentiveness to required display rules, variety of emotions required to be displayed, and emotional dissonance generated as the result of having to express organizationally desired emotions not genuinely felt. In addition, the authors trace the macro-level antecedents (e.g., job characteristics, organizational culture) and micro-level consequences (e.g., job satisfaction) that the performance of emotional labor exposes employees to.
Barsade, S. G. (2002). The ripple effect: Emotional contagion and its influence on group behavior. Administrative science quarterly, 47(4), 644-675.
This article focuses on emotional contagion, a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes. The authors use a 2×2 experimental design the dimensions of emotional valence and activation level, and observe the performance of groups where a confederate enacts distinct mood conditions. They find that positive emotional contagion reduces conflict while leading individuals to greater cooperativeness and higher rating of peers’ performances. Accordingly, the authors conclude that emotional contagion serves as affective information, continuously influencing the emotional states, judgments, and behaviors of others around.
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Additional References
Fong, C. T. (2006). The effects of emotional ambivalence on creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 49(5), 1016-1030.
Knight, A. P. (2015). Mood at the midpoint: Affect and change in exploratory search over time in teams that face a deadline. Organization Science, 26(1), 99-118.
Toubiana, M., & Zietsma, C. (2017). The message is on the wall? Emotions, social media and the dynamics of institutional complexity. Academy of Management Journal, 60(3), 922-953.
Irving, G., Wright, A. & Hibbert, P. (2019) Threshold concept learning: Emotions and liminal space transitions. Management Learning, 50(3), 355–373.
Iszatt-White, M. & Lenney, P. (2020). Enacting emotional labour in consultancy work: Playing with liminality and navigating power dynamics. Management Learning, 51(3), 314–335.
McMurray, R. (2021). Immersion, drowning, dispersion and resurfacing: Coping with the emotions of ethnographic management learning. Management Learning, 53(3), 439-459, doi: 10.1177/13505076211020456.
Shotter, J. & Tsoukas, H. (2014). Performing phronesis: On the way to engaged judgment. Management Learning, 45(4), 377–396.
Town, S., Donovan, M. C. J. & Beach, E. (2021). A “gestalt” framework of emotions and organizing: integrating innate, constructed, and discursive ontologies. Management Learning, 52(5), 519-540.
Curated by Valerio Ianucci, includes items from previous list of readings provided by Management Learning journal.
Word cloud graphic from Pro Word Cloud/Microsoft Word Add-in using Elfenbein (2007) as the source text.