In our analysis, we’ll need three terms that are closely intertwined affect, emotions, and moods. Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of feelings, including both emotions and moods. Emotions are intense feelings directed at someone or something. Moods are less intense feelings than emotions and often arise without a specific event acting as a stimulus. Exhibit 4-1 shows the relationships among affect, emotions, and moods. First, as the exhibit shows, affect is a broad term that encompasses emotions and moods. Second, there are differences between emotions and moods. Emotions are more likely to be caused by a specific event and are more fleeting than moods. Also, some researchers speculate that emotions may be more actionoriented— they may lead us to some immediate action—while moods may be more cognitive, meaning they may cause us to think or brood for a while. Affect, emotions, and moods are separable in theory; in practice the distinction isn’t always defined. When we review the OB topics on emotions and moods, you may see more information about emotions in one area and moods in another. This is simply the state of the research. Let’s start with a review of the basic emotions.
The Basic Emotions
How many emotions are there? There are dozens, including anger, contempt, enthusiasm, envy, fear, frustration, disappointment, embarrassment, disgust, happiness, hate, hope, jealousy, joy, love, pride, surprise, and sadness. Numerous researchers have tried to limit them to a fundamental set.
Moral Emotions
We may tend to think our internal emotions are innate. For instance, if someone jumped out at you from behind a door, wouldn’t you feel surprised? Maybe you would, but you may also feel any of the other five universal emotions— anger, fear, sadness, happiness, or disgust—depending on the circumstance. Our experiences of emotions are closely tied to our interpretations of events. Researchers have been studying what are called moral emotions; that is, emotions that have moral implications because of our instant judgment of the situation that evokes them. Examples of moral emotions include sympathy for the suffering of others, guilt about our own immoral behavior, anger about injustice done to others, and contempt for those who behave unethically.
The Basic moods: Positive and negative affect
As a first step toward studying the effect of moods and emotions in the workplace, we will classify emotions into two categories: positive and negative. Positive emotions—such as joy and gratitude—express a favorable evaluation or feeling. Negative emotions—such as anger and guilt—express the opposite. Keep in mind that emotions can’t be neutral. Being neutral is being non emotional.
Experiencing Moods and Emotions
As if it weren’t complex enough to consider the many distinct emotions and moods a person might identify, the reality is that we all experience moods and emotions differently. For most people, positive moods are somewhat more common than negative moods. Indeed, research finds a positivity offset, meaning that at zero input (when nothing in particular is going on), most individuals experience a mildly positive mood. This appears to be true for employees in a wide range of job settings. For example, one study of customer-service representatives in a British call center revealed that people reported experiencing positive moods 58 percent of the time despite the stressful environment. Another research finding is that negative emotions lead to negative moods. Perhaps this happens because people think about events that created strong negative emotions five times as long as they do about events that created strong positive ones.
The function of Emotions
In some ways, emotions are a mystery. What function do they serve? As we discussed, organizational behaviorists have been finding that emotions can be critical to an effectively functioning workplace. For example, happy employees demonstrate higher performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), fewer CWBs, and less turnover, particularly when they feel supported by their organizations in their effort to do well in their jobs. Gratefulness and awe have been shown to positively predict OCB, which in turn increases trust and emotional expressions of concern. Let’s discuss two critical areas— rationality and ethicality—in which emotions can enhance performance.
Do emotions make us irrational?
How often have you heard someone say, “Oh, you’re just being emotional”? You might have been offended. Observations like this suggest that rationality and emotion are in conflict, and by exhibiting emotion, you are acting irrationally. The perceived association between the two is so strong that some researchers argue displaying emotions such as sadness to the point of crying is so toxic to a career that we should leave the room rather than allow others to witness it. This perspective suggests the demonstration or even experience of emotions can make us seem weak, brittle, or irrational. However, this is wrong. Our emotions actually make our thinking more rational. Why? Because our emotions provide important information about how we understand the world around us and they help guide our behaviors. For instance, individuals in a negative mood may be better able to discern truthful from accurate information than are people in a happy mood.
Do emotions make us ethical?
A growing body of research has begun to examine the relationship between emotions and moral attitudes. It was previously believed that, like decision making in general, most ethical decision making was based on higher-order cognitive processes, but the research on moral emotions increasingly questions this perspective. Numerous studies suggest that moral judgments are largely based on feelings rather than on cognition, even though we tend to see our moral boundaries as logical and reasonable, not as emotional.
Sources of Emotions and Moods
- Personality
- Time of Day
- Day of the Week
- Weather
- Stress
- Social activities
- Sleep
- Exercise
- Age
- Sex
Emotional Labor
If you’ve ever had a job in retail, sales, or waited on tables in a restaurant, you know the importance of projecting a friendly demeanor and smiling. Even though there were days when you didn’t feel cheerful, you knew management expected you to be upbeat when dealing with customers, so you faked it. Every employee expends physical and mental labor by putting body and mind, respectively, into the job. But jobs also require 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. 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 the organization requires workers to show and considers appropriate in a given job.
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.
When employees have to project one emotion while feeling another, this disparity is called emotional dissonance. 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.
It is important to counteract the effects of emotional labor and emotional dissonance. Research in the Netherlands and Belgium indicated that while surface acting is stressful to employees, mindfulness—objectively and deliberately evaluating our emotional situation in the moment—was negatively correlated with emotional exhaustion and positively affected job satisfaction.
Affective Events Theory
We’ve seen that emotions and moods are an important part of our personal and work lives. But how do they influence our job performance and satisfaction? Affective events theory (AET) proposes that employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work, and this reaction influences their job performance and satisfaction. Say you just found out your company is downsizing. You might experience a variety of negative emotions, causing you to worry that you’ll lose your job. Because it is out of your hands, you feel insecure and fearful, and spend much of your time worrying rather than working. Needless to say, your job satisfaction will also be down.
Work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions, to which employees’ personalities and moods predispose them to respond with greater or lesser intensity. People who score low on emotional stability are more likely to react strongly to negative events, and our emotional response to a given event can change depending on mood. Finally, emotions influence a number of performance and satisfaction variables, such as OCB, organizational commitment, level of effort, intention to quit, and workplace deviance.
Emotional Intelligence
