What are emotions and moods?

• Affect: broad range of feelings that people experience.

• Emotions: intense feelings that are directed at someone/something.

• Moods: feelings that tend to be less intense than emotions and that lack a contextual stimulus.

• Positive affect: mood dimension that consists of specific positive emotions such as excitement, self-assurance and cheerfulness at the high end and boredom, sluggishness and tiredness at the low end.

• Negative affect: mood dimensions that consists of emotions such as nervousness, stress and anxiety at the high end and relaxation, tranquility and poise at the low end.

• Positivity offset: tendency of most individuals to experience a mildly positive mood at zero input (when nothing in particular is going on).

• Evolutionary psychology: area of inquiry which argues that we must experience the emotions we do because they serve a purpose.

• Sources of emotions and moods

  • Personality

    • Affect intensity: individual differences in the strength with which individuals experience their emotions.

  • Time of the day

  • Day of the week

  • Weather

    • Illusory correlation: tendency of people to associate two events when in reality there is no connection.

  • Stress

  • Social activities

  • Exercise

  • Age

  • Gender

Emotional labour

• Emotional labour: situation in which an employee expresses organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work.

• Emotional dissonance: inconsistencies between the emotions people feel and the emotions they project.

• Felt emotions: individual’s actual emotions.

• Displayed emotions: emotions that are organizationally required and considered appropriate in a given job.

• Surface acting: hiding one’s inner feeling and forgoing emotional expressions in response to display rules.

• Deep acting: trying to modify one’s true inner feelings based on display rules.

Affective events theory (AET)

• Affective events theory (AET): model which suggests that workplace events cause emotional reactions the part of employees, which then influence workplace attitudes and behaviors.

Emotional intelligence (EI)

• Emotional intelligence (EI): ability to detect and to manage emotional cues and information.

Emotion regulation

• Strategies for emotion regulation and their likely effects

  • Being able to identify and modify the emotions you feel

  • Strategies include acknowledgement rather than suppressing our emotional response

  • Re-evaluating events as they occur

  • Venting is another technique (expressing emotions outwardly).

OB applications of emotions and moods

• Selection → emotional intelligence (EI) is a factor that employers should consider when hiring especially when there is a high level of social interaction involved.

• Decision-making → positive moods and emotions help when decision making, depends but a recent study says negative moods are worse when making decisions.

• Creativity → people in good moods tend to be more creative than people in bad moods, they produce more original ideas, more flexible and open in thinking.

• Motivation → organizations that promote positive moods are likely to have more motivated workers.

• Leadership → effective leaders rely on emotional appeal to help convey their messages, expression of emotions in speeches is often the critical element that makes us accept or reject a leaders message.

• Negotiation → negotiation is an emotional process, skilled negotiator has a “poker face”.

• Customer service → workers emotional state influences customer service, influences level of repeat business and level of customer satisfaction.

  • Emotional contagion: process by which people’s emotions are caused by the emotions of others.

• Job attitudes → people who have a good day at work tend to be in a better mood that evening at work.

• Deviant workplace behaviors → violating established norms provoke negative emotions, people who feel negative emotions are more likely to participate in short-term deviant workplace behaviors.

• Safety and injury at work → employers might improve health and safety by ensuring that workers are engaged in potentially dangerous activities when they are in a bad mood.

• How managers can influence moods → managers can use humor and give their employees small tokens of appreciation for work well done.