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CHAPTER 4
Emotions and Moods
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After studying this chapter, students should be able to:
4-1. Differentiate between emotions and moods.
4-2. Identify the sources of emotions and moods.
4-3. Show the impact emotional labor has on employees.
4-4. Describe affective events theory.
4-5. Describe emotional intelligence.
4-6. Identify strategies for emotional regulation.
4-7. Apply concepts about emotions and moods to specific OB issues.
INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
Instructors may wish to use the following resources when presenting this chapter.
Text Exercises
Myth or Science?: “Smile, and the Work World Smiles with You”
An Ethical Choice: Should Managers Use Emotional Intelligence (EI) Tests?
Personal Inventory Assessment: Emotional Intelligence Assessment
Career OBjectives: How Do I Turn Down The Volume On My Screaming Boss?
Point/Counterpoint: Sometimes Yelling Is For Everyone’s Good
Questions for Review
Experiential Exercise: The Happiness Test
Ethical Dilemma: Data Mining Emotions
Text Cases
Case Incident 1: Crybabies
Case Incident 2: Tall Poppy Syndrome
Instructor’s Choice
This section presents an exercise that is NOT found in the student's textbook. Instructor's Choice
reinforces the text's emphasis through various activities. Some Instructor's Choice activities are
centered on debates, group exercises, Internet research, and student experiences. Some can be
used in class in their entirety, while others require some additional work on the student's part.
The course instructor may choose to use these at any time throughout the class—some may be
more effective as icebreakers, while some may be used to pull together various concepts covered
in the chapter.
Web Exercises
At the end of each chapter of this Instructor’s Manual, you will find suggested exercises and
ideas for researching OB topics on the Internet. The exercises “Exploring OB Topics on the
Web” are set up so that you can simply photocopy the pages, distribute them to your class, and
make assignments accordingly. You may want to assign the exercises as an out-of-class activity
or as lab activities with your class.
Summary and Implications for Managers
Emotions and moods are similar in that both are affective in nature. But they’re also different—
moods are more general and less contextual than emotions.
The time of day and day of the week, stressful events, social activities, and sleep patterns are
some of the factors that influence emotions and moods.
Emotions and moods have proven relevant for virtually every OB topic we study, and they have
implications for managerial practice. Specific implications for managers are below:
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, look to
model positive emotions and moods as much as is authentically possible.
Provide positive feedback to increase the positivity of employees. Of course, it also helps
to hire people who are predisposed to positive moods.
In the service sector, encourage positive displays of emotion, which make customers feel
more positive and thus, improve customer service interactions and negotiations.
Understand the role of emotions and moods to significantly improve your ability to
explain and predict your coworkers’ and other’s behavior.
This chapter begins with a vignette discussing the controversy of the movie “The Interview.” As the escalation over
“The Interview” illustrates, emotions can greatly influence decision making, even sparking conflict with potentially
disastrous consequences. In truth, we cannot set aside our emotions, but we can acknowledge and work with them.
And not all emotions have negative influences on us. Given the obvious role emotions play in our lives, it might
surprise you that, until recently, the field of OB has not given the topic of emotions much attention. Why? Generally,
because emotions in the workplace were historically thought to be detrimental to performance. Although managers
knew emotions were an inseparable part of everyday life, they tried to create organizations that were emotion-free.
Researchers tended to focus on strong negative emotions— especially anger—that interfered with an employee’s
ability to work effectively. Thankfully, this type of thinking is changing. Certainly some emotions, particularly
exhibited at the wrong time, can hinder performance. Other emotions are neutral, and some are constructive.
Employees bring their emotions to work every day, so no study of OB would be comprehensive without considering
their role in workplace behavior.
BRIEF CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. What Are Emotions and Moods?
A. Introduction
1. Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of feelings that people experience,
and encompasses both emotions and moods.
2. Emotions are intense feelings that are directed at someone or something.
3. Moods are less intense feelings than emotions and often arise without a specific event
acting as a stimulus.
4. Exhibit 4-1 shows the relationships among affect, emotions, and mood.
B. The Basic Emotions
1. Numerous researchers have tried to limit and define the dozens of emotions into a
basic set of emotions.
2. Cultural norms that govern emotional expression – how we experience an emotion
isn’t always the same as how we show it.
3. Six essentially universal emotions can be plotted along a continuum: happiness—
surprise—fear—sadness—anger—disgust.
C. Moral Emotions
1. Researchers have been studying what are called moral emotions; that is, emotions
that have moral implications because of our instant judgement of the situation that
evokes them.
2. Interestingly, research indicates that our responses to moral emotions differ from our
responses to other emotions.
3. Moral emotions are learned, usually in childhood, and thus, they are not universal like
innate emotions.
4. Because morality is a construct that differs between cultures, so do moral emotions.
Therefore, we need to be aware of the moral aspects of situations that trigger our
emotions and make certain we understand the context before we act, especially in the
workplace.
D. The Basic Moods: Positive and Negative Affect
1. One way to classify emotions is by whether they are positive or negative.
a. Positive emotions—such as joy and gratitude—express a favorable evaluation or
feeling.
b. Negative emotions—such as anger or guilt—express the opposite.
2. When we group emotions into positive and negative categories, they become mood
states because we are now looking at them more generally instead of isolating one
particular emotion.
a. In Exhibit 4-2, excited is a pure marker of high positive affect, while boredom is
a pure marker of low negative affect.
b. Nervous is a pure marker of high negative affect; relaxed is a pure marker of low
positive affect.
c. We can think of positive affect as a mood dimension consisting of positive
emotions such as excitement, alertness, and elation at the high end and
contentedness, calmness, and serenity at the low end.
d. Negative affect is a mood dimension consisting of nervousness, stress, and
anxiety at the high end and boredom, depression, and fatigue at the low end.
E. Experiencing Moods and Emotions
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Does the degree to which people experience positive and negative emotions vary
across cultures? Yes (see the OB Poll).
4. People in most cultures appear to experience certain positive and negative emotions,
and people interpret them in much the same way worldwide.
5. However, an individual’s experience of emotions appears to be culturally shaped.
F. The Function of Emotions
1. Do emotions make us irrational?
a. Observations of emotions suggest rationality and emotion are in conflict, and that
if you exhibit emotion, you are likely to act irrationally.
b. These perspectives suggest that the demonstration or even experience of emotions
can make us seem weak, brittle, or irrational.
2. Do emotions make us unethical?
a. A growing body of research has begun to examine the relationship between
emotions and moral attitudes.
b. Decision making was believed to be a higher-order cognitive process, but recent
research on moral emotions questions this assumption.
II. Sources of Emotions and Moods
A. Personality
1. Affect intensity—individual differences in the strength with which individuals
experience their emotions.
B. Time of the day
1. People vary in their moods by time of day.
2. Researchers analyzed 509 million Twitter messages from 2.4 million individuals
across 84 countries.
a. Exhibit 4-3 shows positive affect increased after sunrise, tended to peak at
midmorning, remained stable until roughly 7 p.m., and then tended to increase
again until the midnight drop.
C. Day of the week
1. In most cultures, people are in better moods on the weekend.
2. Exhibit 4-4 shows that this is true in several cultures.
D. Weather
1. Weather has little effect on mood.
2. Illusory correlation occurs when people associate two events, but in reality there is
no connection.
E. Stress
1. Stress can be cumulative and does affect mood and emotional states.
F. Social activities
1. Social activities tend to increase positive mood.
2. People who are in positive moods seek out social activities.
G. Sleep
1. A large portion of the U.S. workforce suffers from sleep deprivation.
2. Sleep quality affects mood.
H. Exercise
1. Enhances positive moods, but don’t expect miracles.
I. Age
1. Negative emotions seem to occur less as people get older.
J. Sex
1. Women show greater emotional expression than men, experience emotions more
intensely, and display more frequent expressions of both positive and negative
emotions.
2. Women also report more comfort in expressing emotions.
3. Women are better at reading nonverbal cues than men are.
III. Emotional Labor
A. Introduction
1. Emotional labor is an employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions
during interpersonal transactions at work.
2. Challenge for employees is to project one emotion while simultaneously feeling
another (emotional dissonance).
B. Felt Versus Displayed Emotions
1. Separate emotions into felt (an individual’s actual emotions) and displayed (those
that the organization requires workers to show and considers appropriate in a given
job).
2. Displayed emotions may require acting to keep employment.
3. Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and forgoing emotional expressions in
response to display rules.
4. Deep acting is the modification of inner feelings.
5. Displaying emotions we don’t really feel is exhausting, so it is important to give
employees who engage in surface displays a chance to relax and recharge.
IV. Affective Events Theory
A. Understanding emotions at work has been helped by a model called affective events
theory (AET).
1. Employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work and this
influences job performance and satisfaction.
2. Work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions to which employees’
personalities and moods predispose them to respond with greater or lesser intensity.
B. In summary, AET offers two important messages:
1. First, emotions provide valuable insights into how workplace hassles and uplifting
events influence employee performance and satisfaction.
2. Second, employees and managers shouldn’t ignore emotions or the events that cause
them, even when they appear minor, because they accumulate.
V. Emotional Intelligence
A. Introduction
1. Emotional intelligence (EI) is a person’s ability to:
a. Perceive emotions in the self and others.
b. Understand the meaning of these emotions.
c. Regulate one’s emotions accordingly in a cascading model, as shown in Exhibit
4-5.
2. Several studies suggest EI may play an important role in job performance.
3. EI has been a controversial concept in OB, with supporters and detractors.
B. Emotional Regulation
1. Emotion regulation means to identify and modify the emotions you feel.
C. Emotion Regulation Influences and Outcomes
1. As you might suspect, not everyone is equally good at regulating emotions.
2. Individuals who are higher in the personality trait of neuroticism have more trouble
doing so and often find their moods are beyond their ability to control.
3. The workplace environment has an effect on an individual’s tendency to employ
emotion regulation.
4. In general, diversity in work groups increases the likelihood that you will regulate
your emotions.
5. Racial diversity also has an effect: if diversity is low, the minority will engage in
emotion regulation, perhaps to “fit in” with the majority race as much as possible; if
diversity is high and many different races are represented, the majority race will
employ emotion regulation, perhaps to integrate themselves with the whole group.
a. These findings suggest a beneficial outcome of diversity—it may cause us to
regulate our emotions more consciously and effectively.
6. Changing your emotions takes effort, and this effort can be exhausting.
7. From another perspective, research suggests that avoiding negative emotional
experiences is less likely to lead to positive moods than does seeking out positive
emotional experiences.
D. Emotion Regulation Techniques
1. Researchers of emotion regulation often study the strategies people employ to change
their emotions.
a. One technique we have discussed in this chapter is surface acting, or literally
“putting on a face” of appropriate response to a given situation.
b. Surface acting doesn’t change the emotions, though, so the regulation effect is
minimal, and the result of daily surface acting leads to exhaustion and fewer
OCBs.
c. Deep acting, another technique we have covered, is less psychologically costly
than surface acting because the employee is actually trying to experience the
emotion. Emotion regulation through deep acting can have a positive impact on
work outcomes.
2. One technique of emotion regulation is emotional suppression, or suppressing initial
emotional responses to situations.
a. This response seems to facilitate practical thinking in the short term. However, it
appears to be helpful only when a strongly negative event would illicit a
distressed emotional reaction in a crisis situation.
3. Thus, unless we’re truly in a crisis situation, acknowledging rather than suppressing
our emotional responses to situations, and re-evaluating events after they occur, yields
the best outcomes.
4. Cognitive reappraisal, or reframing our outlook on an emotional situation, is one way
to effectively regulate emotions.
a. This result suggests that cognitive reappraisal may allow people to change their
emotional responses, even when the subject matter is as highly emotionally
charged as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
5. Another technique with potential for emotion regulation is social sharing, or venting.
6. Research shows that the open expression of emotions can help individuals to regulate
their emotions, as opposed to keeping emotions “bottled up.”
7. Social sharing can reduce anger reactions when people can talk about the facts of a
bad situation, their feelings about the situation, or any positive aspects of the
situation.
8. While emotion regulation techniques can help us cope with difficult workplace
situations, research indicates that the effect varies.
9. Thus, while there is much promise in emotion regulation techniques, the best route to
a positive workplace is to recruit positive-minded individuals and train leaders to
manage their moods, job attitudes, and performance.
E. Ethics of Emotion Regulation
1. Emotion regulation has important ethical implications. Some people might argue that
controlling your emotions is unethical because it requires a degree of acting.
2. Recent research has found that acting like you are in a good mood might put you in a
good mood.
VI. OB Applications of Emotions and Moods
A. Selection
1. One implication from the evidence on EI to date is that employers should consider it a
factor in hiring employees, especially in jobs that demand a high degree of social
interaction.
2. More employers are starting to use EI measures to hire people.
B. Decision Making
1. OB researchers are increasingly finding that moods and emotions have important
effects on decision making, but there are other variables that require further research.
C. Creativity
1. Good moods are associated with idea generation.
2. Some believe that good moods make people more creative, but others don’t agree.
D. Motivation
1. Several studies have highlighted the importance of moods and emotions on
motivation.
E. Leadership
1. Effective leaders rely on emotional appeals to help convey their messages.
2. The expression of emotion is often the critical element that results in individuals
accepting or rejecting a leader’s message.
F. Negotiation
1. Displaying a negative emotion can be effective in negotiation.
2. Emotions may impair negotiator performance.
G. Customer service
1. Quality customer service makes demands on employees that can create emotional
dissonance.
2. Emotional contagion is an important consideration.
H. Job Attitudes
1. 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.
2. People who have a stressful day at work also have trouble relaxing after they get off
work.
3. If you’ve had a bad day at work, your spouse is likely to have an unpleasant evening.
I. Deviant Workplace Behaviors
1. Negative emotions can lead to deviant workplace behaviors.
2. For example, envy is an emotion that occurs when you resent someone for having
something that you do not, and which you strongly desire; it can lead to malicious
deviant behaviors.
3. Once aggression starts, it’s likely that other people will become angry and aggressive,
so the stage is set for a serious escalation of negative behavior.
4. Managers, therefore, need to stay connected with their employees to gauge emotions
and emotional intensity levels.
J. Safety and Injury at Work
1. Employers might improve health and safety (and reduce costs) by ensuring that
workers aren’t engaged in potentially dangerous activities when they’re in a bad
mood.
2. Individuals in negative moods tend to be more anxious, which can make them less
able to cope effectively with hazards.
3. Negative moods also make people more distractible, and distractions can obviously
lead to careless behaviors.
K. How Managers Can Influence Moods
1. Selecting positive team members can have a contagion effect, as positive moods
transmit from team member to team member.
VII. Summary and Implications for Managers
A. Emotions and moods are similar in that both are affective in nature. But they’re also
different—moods are more general and less contextual than emotions.
B. The time of day and day of the week, stressful events, social activities, and sleep patterns
are some of the factors that influence emotions and moods.
C. Emotions and moods have proven relevant for virtually every OB topic we study, and
they have implications for managerial practice. Specific implications for managers are
below:
1. Recognize that emotions are a natural part of the workplace and good management
does not mean creating an emotion-free environment.
2. To foster effective decision making, creativity, and motivation in employees, look to
model positive emotions and moods as much as is authentically possible.
3. Provide positive feedback to increase the positivity of employees. Of course, it also
helps to hire people who are predisposed to positive moods.
4. In the service sector, encourage positive displays of emotion, which make customers
feel more positive and thus, improve customer service interactions and negotiations.
5. Understand the role of emotions and moods to significantly improve your ability to
explain and predict your coworkers’ and others’ behavior.
EXPANDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. Why Were Emotions Ignored in OB?
A. The “Myth of Rationality”.
B. Emotions were seen as disruptive.
II. What Are Emotions and Moods?
A. Introduction
1. Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of feelings that people experience
and encompasses both emotions and moods.
2. Emotions are intense feelings that are directed at someone or something.
3. Moods are less intense feelings than emotions and often arise without a specific event
acting as a stimulus.
4. Exhibit 4-1 shows the relationships among affect, emotions, and mood.
5. Affect is a broad term encompassing both emotions and moods.
6. Differences exist between emotions and moods.
7. Emotions and moods can mutually influence each other.
B. The Basic Emotions
1. Numerous researchers have tried to limit and define the dozens of emotions into a
basic set of emotions.
2. Differences exist among researchers in this area.
3. Contemporary research, psychologists have tried to identify basic emotions by
studying facial expressions.
4. Cultural norms that govern emotional expression – how we experience an emotions
isn’t always the same as how we show it.
5. There has been agreement on six essentially universal emotions – anger, fear, sadness,
happiness, disgust, and surprise.
6. Plot emotions along a continuum: happiness—surprise—fear—sadness—anger—
disgust.
C. Moral Emotions
1. Researchers have been studying what are called moral emotions; that is, emotions
that have moral implications because of our instant judgement of the situation that
evokes them.
2. Interestingly, research indicates that our responses to moral emotions differ from our
responses to other emotions.
3. Moral emotions are learned, usually in childhood, and thus, they are not universal like
innate emotions.
4. Because morality is a construct that differs between cultures, so do moral emotions.
Therefore, we need to be aware of the moral aspects of situations that trigger our
emotions and make certain we understand the context before we act, especially in the
workplace.
D. The Basic Moods: Positive and Negative Affect
1. One way to classify emotions is by whether they are positive or negative.
a. Positive emotions—such as joy and gratitude—express a favorable evaluation or
feeling.
b. Negative emotions—such as anger or guilt—express the opposite.
c. Keep in mind that emotions can’t be neutral. Being neutral is being
non-emotional.
2. When we group emotions into positive and negative categories, they become mood
states because we are now looking at them more generally instead of isolating one
particular emotion.
a. In Exhibit 4-2, excited is a pure marker of high positive affect, while boredom is
a pure marker of low negative affect.
b. Nervous is a pure marker of high negative affect; relaxed is a pure marker of low
positive affect.
c. We can think of positive affect as a mood dimension consisting of positive
emotions such as excitement, alertness, and elation at the high end and
contentedness, calmness, and serenity at the low end.
d. Negative affect is a mood dimension consisting of nervousness, stress, and
anxiety at the high end and boredom, depression, and fatigue at the low end.
(Note: Positive and negative affect are moods.)
E. Experiencing Moods and Emotions
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. Does the degree to which people experience positive and negative emotions vary
across cultures? Yes (see the OB Poll).
4. People in most cultures appear to experience certain positive and negative emotions,
and people interpret them in much the same way worldwide.
5. However, an individual’s experience of emotions appears to be culturally shaped.
F. The Function of Emotions
1. Do emotions make us irrational?
a. Observations of emotions suggest rationality and emotion are in conflict, and that
if you exhibit emotion, you are likely to act irrationally.
b. These perspectives suggest the demonstration or even experience of emotions can
make us seem weak, brittle, or irrational.
1) The example of Phineas Gage and many other brain injury studies show
emotions are critical to rational thinking.
c. The key to good decision making is to employ both thinking and feeling in our
decisions.
2. Do emotions make us unethical?
a. A growing body of research has begun to examine the relationship between
emotions and moral attitudes.
b. Decision making was believed to be a higher-order cognitive process, but recent
research on moral emotions questions this assumption.
1) Examples of moral emotions include sympathy for the suffering of others,
guilt about our own immoral behavior, anger about injustice done to others,
contempt for those who behave unethically, and disgust at violations of moral
norms.
2) Numerous studies suggest that these reactions are largely based on feelings
rather than cold cognition.
G. Sources of Emotions and Moods
1. Personality
a. Affect intensity—individual differences in the strength with which individuals
experience their emotions.
b. People differ in how predisposed they are to experience emotions intensely.
c. Affectively intense people experience both positive and negative emotions more
deeply:
1) When they’re sad, they’re really sad.
2) When they’re happy, they’re really happy.
2. Time of the day
a. Levels of positive affect tend to peak in the late morning and then remain at that
level until early evening.
b. Most research suggests that negative affect fluctuates less than positive affect, but
the general trend is for it to increase over the course of a day.
