Individual Sources, Dynamics, and Expressions of Emotion: Volume 9

While researchers have assumed that it is not possible to determine the key reactants that cause positive emotional reactions, we argue that experiences, such as watching an entertaining television show or working in a pleasant climate, produce their positive effects through one or more “root causes” of positive emotion. This study identified a classification of root causes derived from reports of individual positive moments submitted by office workers throughout their workday. Through identifying root causes, such as Fulfilled Expectations, Positive Self-Image, Humor, and Relief, we provide the first data-driven attempt to develop a taxonomy of root causes of positive affect at work.

Existing theoretical explanations about the influence of affect in the process of creating ideas (ideation) and their corresponding empirical findings are contradictory. The purpose of the present chapter is to provide new insights by providing a theoretical explanation that is able to encompass these contradictions, and to support this theoretical approach with empirical data. We draw on personality-systems-interactions (PSI) and use an experimental design to capture dynamic effects between affect and ideation. Our findings emphasize the mediating role of affect in the ideation process and the moderating role of individual action-control in the regulation of affect and respective creative behavior.

One organizational phenomenon in which emotions undoubtedly emerge is that of abusive supervision. To date, however, very little research has examined emotional responses associated with perceptions of abuse by supervisors. If subordinates believe that responsibility for abuse does not fall on the abusive supervisors but on the organization itself, they might think the abuse is uncontrollable or unintentional on the part of the supervisors. This attribution shift may result in feelings of sympathy toward the supervisor. In this chapter, we suggest that such responses are likely to occur when subordinates are under no-escape conditions. This circumstance can lead subordinates to forgive their supervisor and retaliate against their organization.

This chapter explores the nature of disengagement and the role played by emotions while disentangling the overlapping theories and definitions of both engagement and disengagement. We carried out two related studies exploring engagement and disengagement in 10 large UK public and private sector organisations. Both studies used an interpretive approach involving 75 managers and employees. The chapter suggests that emotions play a mediating role in the process of disengagement and the emotional reaction involved provides a distinction to being ‘not engaged’. It highlights the confusion that different approaches bring to distinguishing engagement and disengagement from other job attitudes.

This chapter introduces a new theoretical framework for developing emotion-related abilities according to the emotional intelligence (EI) construct definition of Mayer, Salovey, and Caruso (2006). The awareness, reflection, and management (ARM) model has been devised and demonstrates a triadic cycle of emotional ARM relating to affect, cognition, and behavior. The ARM model constitutes an approach to nurture emotion-related abilities (ability EI) and responds to criticism raised by Zeidner, Matthews, and Roberts (2009). The ARM Theory was corroborated by both learning theory and schools of counselling (SOC). The potential to develop emotion-related abilities in emotional awareness, reflection and reasoning, coping and management is discussed.

We offer a new perspective on group affective diversity by introducing the construct of mixed group mood, denoting co-occurring positive and negative mood states between different members of a group. Mixed group mood is characterized by four facets, namely members’ distribution between two positive and negative subgroups, subgroups’ average mood intensity, subgroups’ mood intensity heterogeneity, and individual members’ mood ambivalence. Building on information/decision-making and social categorization/similarity–attraction perspectives, we explore the performance consequences of mixed group mood along these four facets and we discuss implications and directions for future research.

Emotion recognition and emotion expression/regulation are important aspects of emotional intelligence (EI). Although the construct of EI is widely used and its components are part of many investigations, there is still no sufficient picture set that can be used for systematic research of facial emotion recognition and practical applications of individual assessments. In this research we present a new Facial Action Coding System validated picture set consisting of six emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). Basic principles of stimulus development and evaluation process are described. The PFA-U can be used for future studies in organization for the assessment of emotion recognition, emotion stimulation, and emotion management.

This chapter explores the effect of service employees’ trait authenticity on customer satisfaction as mediated by work engagement, surface acting, and perceived authenticity. Data were collected from service employee–customer dyads. The results indicate that employees’ work engagement and surface acting mediate the effect of trait authenticity on customers’ satisfaction and perception of authenticity. Trait authenticity is positively related to work engagement and negatively related to surface acting. Evidence that authenticity is desirable in service roles suggests that organizations should consider this characteristic as a significant factor in selection and placement of service employees.

This study examines the relationship between emotional labour and burnout and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence on this relationship. The survey was conducted at several tourism and hospitality organizations in Florida, USA. The results show that both acting strategies of emotional labour relate positively to burnout. Tests of moderation show that emotional intelligence reduces employee burnout. These findings contribute to the literature on emotional labour by incorporating emotional intelligence as a moderator, and provide some guidance for human resource practitioners about potentially beneficial training and recruitment activities. They also have implications for customer relationship management.

Drawing on affect-based mechanisms, this chapter describes two forms of customer mistreatment, aggressive and demanding mistreatment. Tests are conducted of their lagged effects in predicting within-person fluctuation of employees’ negative mood, as well as the moderating roles of employees’ emotion regulation after work (i.e., rumination and social sharing). 1,185 daily surveys were collected from 149 Chinese customer service representatives from a call center for eight weekdays. Results supported the main effects of both forms of customer mistreatment and partly supported the moderating roles of rumination in strengthening the impacts of customer mistreatment. Implications and limitations are discussed.

This chapter focuses on whether perceived emotional intensity and help need is possible to discriminate in expressions of fear and neutrality in brief authentic emergency calls. Extraction of acoustic parameters of fear and neutrality was done prior to letting participants listen to a low-pass-filtered stimuli set. Participants discriminated fear and neutrality in both the intensity and help need condition. In turn, judged intensity and judged help need correlated strongly, with partial correlations indicating that participants use acoustically measured intensity (mean dB) as information to infer the intensity/help need relationship. We also discuss the implications of emotional expression in the call centre domain.

The current chapter presents a qualitative analysis of the emotional and substantive content of 300 vents found on public job-related venting web sites. We leverage the related yet distinct literatures on venting, complaining, expressive writing, and computer-mediated communication to gain insight into how employees understand, communicate, and try to manage emotional experiences at work through these types of outlets. We found that employees vent about mistreatment by others, others’ incompetence or laziness, inequity, under-stimulation, and broader economic trends. In doing so, they often express anger in extreme forms involving profanity, personal attacks, and desires for retribution.

This chapter explores how electronic affective displays may influence individual perceptions, behavior and performance by conducting an exploratory analysis using a sample of real work emails (study 1), along with a laboratory experiment (study 2). The findings from both studies indicate that positive affective displays may have a stronger impact on individual perceptions (study 1) and invoke greater reciprocity from electronic partners (study 2) than negative affective displays. Moreover, some interesting gender effects with respect to affective displays and individual negotiation performance are observed. The implications for the field, along with limitations of the current research, are discussed.

Emailing does not preclude emotional exchange and many times it causes us to engage in spiralling exchanges of increasingly angry emailing. The purpose of this chapter is threefold: to explore how factors of temporality are related to anger when emailing, to model circumstances that protect against, but also ignite, anger escalation, and to raise a discussion for practitioners of how to avoid damaging email communication. By intersecting literature on communication, information systems, psychology and organisational studies, factors leading to an ‘emotional verge’ are identified and summarised in a model showing factors likely to prime, but also protect against, anger escalation.