Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
EXPANDED CHAPTER OUTLINE
I. What Are Emotions and Moods?
A. Introduction
and encompasses both emotions and moods.
caused by a specific event.
4. Exhibit 4-1 shows the relationships among affect, emotions, and mood.
B. The Basic Emotions
basic set of emotions.
2. Differences exist among researchers in this area.
studying facial expressions.
5. There has been agreement on six essentially universal emotions – anger, fear, sadness,
happiness, disgust, and surprise.
C. Moral Emotions
1. Researchers have been studying what are called moral emotions; that is, emotions
evokes them.
responses to other emotions.
innate emotions.
4. Because morality is a construct that differs between cultures, so do moral emotions.
workplace.
D. The Basic Moods: Positive and Negative Affect
1. One way to classify emotions is by whether they are positive or negative.
feeling.
b. Negative emotions—such as anger or guilt—express the opposite.
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.
107
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
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
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.
across cultures? Yes (see the OB Poll).
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
emotions are critical to rational thinking.
2. Do emotions make us ethical?
a. A growing body of research has begun to examine 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.
unconscious responses and shared moral emotions.
2) Unfortunately, these shared emotions may allow us to justify purely emotional
reactions as rationally “ethical” just because we share them with others.
G. Sources of Emotions and Moods
1. Personality
experience their emotions.
b. 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 Day
108
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
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.
c. Researchers analyzed millions of Twitter messages from individuals across the
globe.
4. Weather
a. Weather has little effect on mood.
b. Illusory correlation occurs when people associate two events, but in reality, there
is no connection.
5. Stress
6. Social Activities
epicurean are more strongly associated with increases in positive mood.
7. Sleep
irritable and less alert.
8. Exercise
a. Research consistently shows that exercise enhance peoples’ positive moods.
9. Age
a. Older adults tend to focus on more positive stimuli (and less on negative stimuli)
than younger adults, a finding confirmed across nearly 100 studies.
10. Sex
a. Women show greater emotional expression than men, experience emotions more
intensely, and display more frequent expressions of both positive and negative
emotions.
b. People also tend to attribute men’s and women’s emotions in ways that might be
based on stereotypes of what typical emotional reactions are.
II. Emotional Labor
A. Introduction
1. Emotional labor is an employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions
during interpersonal transactions at work.
2. The concept emerged from studies of service jobs.
B. Felt Versus Displayed Emotions
109
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
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. Displaying fake emotions requires us to suppress real ones.
a. Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and hiding emotional expressions in
response to display rules.
b. Deep acting is trying to modify our true inner feelings based on display rules.
3. 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.
4. The disparity between employees having to project one emotion while feeling
another is called emotional dissonance.
III. Affective Events Theory
A. A 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.
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.
3. The events-reaction relationship is moderated by the employee’s personality and
mood.
4. A person’s emotional response to a given event can change depending on his or her
mood.
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.
IV. 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.
their choice process.
b. The students also de-emphasized the use of the more cognitive parts of their
brains.
3. EI has been a controversial concept in OB, with supporters and detractors.
B. Emotion Regulation
an independent concept.
110
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
2. The central ideal behind emotion regulation is to identify and modify the emotions
you feel.
C. Emotion Regulation Influences and Outcomes
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
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
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
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.
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.
111
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
become popular in organizations.
9. While emotion regulation techniques can help us cope with difficult workplace
situations, research indicates that the effect varies.
10. 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
good mood.
V. 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.
B. Decision Making
1. Traditional approaches to the study of decision making in organizations have
emphasized rationality.
2. But OB researchers are increasingly finding that moods and emotions have important
effects on decision making.
information.
4. OB researchers continue to debate the role of negative emotions and moods in
decision making.
a. Recent research suggests that depressed people make poorer decisions.
C. Creativity
creative.
a. They argue that when people are in positive moods, they may relax and not
engage in the critical thinking necessary for some forms of creativity.
D. Motivation
1. Several studies have highlighted the importance of moods and emotions on
motivation.
mood first.
2) The other group was not shown the clip and started working on the puzzles
right away.
3) The positive-mood group reported higher expectations of being able to solve
the puzzles, worked harder at them, and solved more puzzles as a result.
112
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
people perform even better, and so on.
c. Another study looked at the moods of insurance sales agents in Taiwan.
1) Agents in a good mood were more helpful toward their coworkers and also
felt better about themselves.
2) These factors in turn led to superior performance in the form of higher sales
and better supervisor reports of performance.
E. Leadership
often freely share their own emotions.
3. Corporate executives know emotional content is critical if employees are to buy into
their vision of the company’s future and accept change.
F. Negotiation
1. Displaying a negative emotion can be effective in negotiation, but feeling bad about
your performance appears to impair future negotiations.
G. Customer Service
from others.
3. When someone experiences positive emotions and laughs and smiles at you, you tend
to respond positively.
H. Work-Life Satisfaction
1. Several studies have shown people who had a good day at work tend to be in a better
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 a number of deviant workplace behaviors.
2. Employee deviance: voluntary actions that violate established norms and which
threaten the organization, its members, or both.
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.
113
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page
lead to careless behaviors.
4. Selecting positive team members can have a contagion effect as positive moods
transmit from team member to team member.
VI. Summary and Implications for Managers
A. Emotions and moods are similar in that both are affective in nature. But they’re also
matter.
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. OB research on emotional labor, affective events theory, emotional intelligence, and
emotion regulation helps us understand how people deal with emotions.
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.
explain and predict your coworkers’ and others’ behavior.
114