PM 4035The Psychology of Work

Lecture 4Week 4

Studying Individuals at workEmotion

Terminology

• Affect– Feeling states: in the moment, short-term affective

experiences• Emotions: elicited by particular cause, include physiological

reactions, are relatively intense and short-lived• Moods: diffuse, general positive/negative feeling, not focused

on specific cause

– Feeling traits: stable tendencies to feel and act in certain ways• Dispositional affect: a personality trait, the person's relatively

stable, underlying tendency to experience positive and negative moods and emotions

Measurement

• Emotions are discrete• Focused on specific target• Basic emotions are joy, love, anger, fear,

sadness, disgust and surprise• Moods and dispositional affect are

dimensional-affective experience labels are arranged as axes

Affective circumplex (Barrett and Russell, 1998)

Other categories of affect that can influence work behaviour are

• Affective Intensity

• Emotional contagion: being prone to catching other peoples’ emotions

• Emotional expressivity

Three emerging trends

• Emotional Intelligence• “An ability to monitor one’s own and others’

feelings and emotions, to discriminate among them and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (Salovey and Mayer, 1990:189)– Perceiving emotions– Using emotions– Understanding emotions– Managing emotions

• Emotion regulation and emotion labor• Emotional regulation: attempt to influence

which emotions we have, when we have them and how these are expressed

• Emotional labor: managing public displays of emotions to comply with normative display rules

• Emotional contagion and Collective affect• Emotional contagion: processes that allow the

sharing or transferring of emotions from one individual to other group members

Why does affect matter in organizations?

Affect and performance

• An individual’s tendency to experience positive emotions and moods is associated with increases in a variety of work performance measures

– Dispositional affect– Mood-emotional contagion– Emotional intelligence

Affect and decision making

• Positive affect can led to more efficient decision making

• However, also negative affect can lead to more effective decision making

• Influence of discrete emotions

Affect and creativity

• Positive affect positively influences creativity by leading to the processing of more cognitive material and to more complex, flexible thinking

Affect and Turnover/Absence

• Positive affect is associated with reduced absence and intention to turnover

• Workers who are high in positive affect are more likely to leave their jobs if they are dissatisfied than are people who have low positive affect

Affect and Prosocial behavior

• Employees who experience positive moods at work are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior

• Leader’s positive mood “rubs off” on group members

Affect and Negotiation and Conflict resolution

• Positive moods help to resolve conflict• Negotiators in a positive mood are more

effective

• Anger as a discrete emotion may be effective in negotiations

• Emotional intelligence, especially emotion perception and understanding, positively influence negotiation

Collective affect and team behavior

• Group emotion is defined by the affective composition of the various affective attributes of the group members

• Or

• Collectively held norms about appropriate emotions to express or hold in a group shape the type of emotions that are allowed and expressed in a group context

Affect and Leadership

• Positive affect contributes to effective leadership– Transformational leadership

• Followers are influenced by leaders’ displays of emotions

Conclusion

• Overwhelming evidence that experiencing and expressing positive emotions and moods tends to enhance performance at individual, group and organizational levels

• The influence of negative affect is complex