Series Title Emotion in Organizations : A Review in Stages Permalink

Emotion has become one of the most popular—and popularized—areas within organizational scholarship. This chapter attempts to review and bring together within a single framework the wide and often disjointed literature on emotion in organizations. The integrated framework includes processes detailed by previous theorists who have defined emotion as a sequence that unfolds chronologically. The emotion process begins with a focal individual who is exposed to an eliciting stimulus, registers the stimulus for its meaning, and experiences a feeling state and physiological changes, with downstream consequences for attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions, as well as facial expressions and other emotionally expressive cues. These downstream consequences can result in externally visible behaviors and cues that become, in turn, eliciting stimuli for interaction partners. For each stage of the emotion process there are distinct emotion regulation processes, that incorporate individual differences and group norms and that can become automatic with practice. Although research often examines these stages in relative isolation from each other, I argue that each matters largely due to its interconnectedness with the other stages. Incorporating intra-individual, individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels of analysis, this framework can be a starting point to situate, theorize and test explicit mechanisms for the influence of emotion on organizational life. Emotion in Organizations 3 “We keep coming back to feelings, I'll have time for feelings after I’m dead. Right now we’re busy. ” NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, speaking about the historic Independence Day 2006 launch of the space shuttle Discovery, after discussing the horror and sadness at losing the Columbia space shuttle in 2003, the worry leading up to the launch of Discovery, and the relief and pleasure at watching Discovery succeed (Boyce, 2006). This is an exciting time to be a researcher interested in emotion in organizations. In the wake of best-selling popular books (e.g., Goleman, 1995), as well as the resurgence of decades-old investigations of worker sentiments (Hersey, 1932), there has been heightened—indeed, often hysterical—enthusiasm from practitioners and academics alike. This popularization has tended to elevate the status and legitimacy of emotion as a topic of scholarly inquiry, and has lead to a near explosion of research on the topic (Barsade, Brief, & Spataro, 2003; Brief & Weiss, 2002; Rafaeli & Worline, 2001), which represents a large-scale reversal of lay beliefs that the best way to manage emotions in the workplace is not to have any. Frederick Taylor’s (1911) scientific management focused on machine-like efficiency, and discounted emotion because it was seen as irrational, personal, and feminine (Mumby & Putnam, 1992)—as typified in the opening quote. By contrast, researchers now celebrate the infusion of emotion into organizational life (Fineman, 1996)—with implications for individual, group, and even firm performance, as well as intricate connections to organizational phenomena as varied as justice, diversity, power, creativity, stress, culture, and others. The explosion of research in this area has been a boon but it has also been a mess. Popularization has led to many sweeping—yet often poorly substantiated (e.g., Goleman, 1995)—claims about the power of emotion to be harnessed for the bottom line. The academic literature has been extensive, but often only a loosely connected body of work with disparate themes all included under the banner of emotion. Often research takes existing topics within management and divides them into purportedly emotional vs. nonemotional versions. At some extremes, arguments nearly claim that everything is emotion, that it now Emotion in Organizations 4 encompasses every phenomenon heretofore studied across management and organization. One question, then, is how to articulate boundaries because, for emotion to mean anything, it cannot mean everything. Another question is how to integrate the study of emotion into a coherent whole. The present chapter is the first to organize a review of the research literature on emotion in organizations around an integration of psychologists’ conceptions of the emotion process. At this point a definition of emotion may—or may not—be necessary. Although we tend to think that we know emotion when we see it, researchers have proposed a wide variety of definitions, the most widely held that emotions are adaptive responses to the demands of the environment (Ekman, 1992; Scherer, 1984; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). However, Fridlund (1994) argued that there is no formal definition of emotion that is not tautological in some way, and ultimately suggested that emotion is merely a social convention for discussing behavioral intentions. At its core, most theorists agree that emotion is a reaction to a stimulus and has a range of possible consequences (Frijda, 1988). Whereas emotions typically refer to discrete and intense but short-lived experiences, moods are experiences that are longer and more diffuse, and lack awareness of the eliciting stimulus. Moods can be created by stimuli of relatively low intensity, or can be left behind by emotions that fade so that the initial antecedent is no longer salient (e.g., Cropanzano, Weiss, Hale, & Reb, 2003; Schwarz, 1990). Affect is an umbrella term encompassing mood and emotion (Forgas, 1995). I. The Emotion Process The integrated process framework presented here draws on processes detailed by distinguished theorists of emotion and social judgment, including Brunswick (1955), Buck (1984), Frijda (1986; Frijda & Mesquita, 1994), Fridlund (1994), Ekman (1972), Gross (2001), Scherer (1984, 1995), Weiss and Cropanzano (1996), and others who have argued for theoretical models of emotion as an interrelated series of processes that unfold chronologically. It incorporates important contributions from psychology and allied fields such as sociology and organization studies. Emotion in Organizations 5 The goal of this chapter is to review the existing research literature on emotion in organizations systematically in terms of this process framework. Although it is beyond the scope of the chapter also to review the entire underlying literature on emotion, where possible it includes that which is illustrative or directly relevant. It would be an overly ambitious claim for any model to account for absolutely every aspect of emotion studied within organizational settings. However, at the risk of failing, this is a first attempt to move away from characterizing the vast literature as discrete topics, and to integrate it into a single framework. To the extent that this attempt falls short, it is a starting point for further development. Insert Figures 1 and 2 about here The emotion process begins in Figure 1 with intrapersonal processes when a focal individual is exposed to an eliciting stimulus, registers the stimulus for its meaning, and experiences a feeling state and physiological changes, with downstream consequences for attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions, as well as facial expressions and other emotionally expressive cues. Further, Frijda (1988) argued that emotions automatically trigger secondary controlled responses to regulate the emotion, which Figure 1 illustrates in the gray shaded area. At each stage, regulation processes allow for individual and group norms to override automatic processing (e.g., Frijda, 1986; Grandey, 2000; Gross, 2001), although this distinction can blur when practice at any of these regulated processes renders them over-learned and, thus, automatic (Campos, Frankel, & Camras, 2004; Gross, 1998). Moving from intrapersonal to interpersonal processes, the downstream consequences of emotional experience can result in externally visible behaviors and cues that become, in turn, the eliciting stimulus for interaction partners, as depicted in Figure 2. Each step of the emotion process is presented in more detail in the sections below. Although common wisdom considers emotion to be chaotic and disorganized, the emotion process is orderly, carefully sequenced, and governed by empirical regularities (Frijda, 1988). Emotions unfold chronologically through a rule-governed sequence of automatic components depicted in the figures (Frijda, 1986, 1988; Gross, 2001). The controlled components in the gray box arise at specific Emotion in Organizations 6 stages, but are optional and can end at any point. Not every path is possible, and the arrows in the figures identify links previously theorized and empirically documented. These steps unfold so quickly that they can appear together to represent a single phenomenon. However, for conceptual clarity I prefer to treat emotion more as an adjective than a noun: each piece of the process is emotional, but no single piece on its own is emotion. Although the stages are often studied in relative isolation from each other, I argue that each process matters largely because the other processes matter with which it is interconnected. For example, we care about the ability to recognize emotional cues only because an emotional expression suggests something about another person’s emotional experience, which suggests something about the other’s evaluations of the stimuli in his or her environment. Likewise, we care about leaders’ emotional expressions because followers interpret these expressions as important stimuli. The focus on individual and dyadic processes evidenced in Figures 1 and 2 is in no way intended to discount the emotional role of groups, organizations, and societies. Indeed, their crucial role is infused throughout the framework, first within the norms inherent in the regulated components and second within the dyadic processes that can occur en masse. Thus, the framework captures multiple levels of analysis, including intra-individual, individual differences, interpersonal, and organizational p