Emotion in Organizations: A Review in Stages

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 processes. II. From a Stimulus to Emotional Registration and Experience Starting with William James (1884), modern psychologists have emphasized that emotional experience follows the perception of a stimulus. More recently, Weiss and Cropanzano’s (1996) Affective Events Theory (AET) characterized emotional states in the workplace as “discrete reactions precipitated by specific events” (p. 41). Thus, Figure 1 begins with a stimulus. A. Stimuli A stimulus need not literally be an event that occurs, but can also be a stable feature of the environment that is salient. Indeed, any contact between people and their environment can become an Emotion in Organizations 7 affective event, particularly when the environment includes other people. Kelly and Barsade (2001) argue that greater interdependence in the modern workplace makes it contain more intensely evocative stimuli. The monotony of past work ensured that mostly routine events arose, whereas working closely with other people brings new and changing stimuli. Among the greatest emotional impact for workers are those events related to interactions with coworkers, customers, and supervisors, with leaders’ behaviors looming particularly large (e.g., Basch & Fisher, 2000; Dasborough, 2006; Gaddis, Connelly, & Mumford, 2004; Mignonac & Herrback, 2004). Although social interactions tend to be the most salient, economic events and conditions are also important emotional elicitors (Brief & Weiss, 2002), as are a variety of environmental factors such as temperature, noise, and aromas (Isen & Baron, 1991), and physical artifacts such as colors and symbols (Rafaeli & Vilnai-Yavetz, 2004) that can be fleeting or chronic. Emotions also emerge from the act of engaging in work itself (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Sandelands, 1988), and from external factors that carry over to work, such as family concerns (Brief & Weiss, 2002). Beyond mechanical tasks, we relate to our work as a series of interactions and relationships with other people (Dutton & Dukerich, 2006; Wrzesniewski, Dutton, & Debebe, 2003). Examining a range of narratives about work, Boudens (2005) found that themes of establishing and maintaining equilibrium in relationships and maintaining personal boundaries and identity tended to be particularly evocative of emotion. Positive elicitors included work-related accomplishments and overcoming obstacles, personal support, solidarity, and connectedness. Negative elicitors included inequitable situations focusing largely on non-financial compensation, discrimination, both covert and overt conflicts and power struggles, violations of norms and trust to the detriment of other individuals or the workplace itself, ideology-based disagreements, actual or potential on-the-job death and injury, and humiliation. In Mignonac and Herrbach’s (2004) large-scale survey, the most frequent positive events were accomplishment and praise from supervisors and coworkers, and the most frequent negative events were being assigned undesired work, the departure of a well-liked co-worker, interpersonal conflicts with supervisors and coworkers, Emotion in Organizations 8 and the interference with work of personal problems. There is a long history of focusing on job characteristics and other environmental factors as important stimuli that influence workers’ affective states (Hackman & Oldham, 1976; Herzberg, 1966; Saavedra & Kwun, 2000). Indeed, many emotional experiences are related to particular job functions. Haas’ (1977) steelworkers spent their days in precarious positions at great heights. Call center representatives report that they face an average of 10 customers per day who are verbally aggressive (Grandey, Dickter, & Sin, 2004). Research and development teams frequently faced technical problems, insufficient staffing, conflict among team members, and funding shortages (Pirola-Merlo, Härtel, Mann, & Hirst, 2002). They also experience the excitement of having creative ideas and seeing them recognized by colleagues (Amabile, Barsade, Mueller, & Staw, 2005). Because emotions are elicited the most strongly for our most central concerns, one’s position within an organization can affect the most influential stimuli. For example, individuals low in a hierarchy express concerns about being treated kindly by others, whereas superiors express concerns about their subordinates following rules and norms (Fitness, 2000; Sloan, 2004). Annoying experiences for Disneyland theme park employees include “having children and adults asking whether the water in the lagoon is real, or where the well-marked toilets might be, or where Walt Disney’s tomb is to be found, or the real clincher—whether one is ‘really real’” (Van Maanen & Kunda, 1989, p. 69). B. Emotional Registration The attributes of an event may be objective, but meanings materialize (Weick et al., 2005). Including in Figure 1 an intervening stage in the process framework between the stimulus and experience does not represent a stand in the longstanding debate about the primacy of affect vs. cognition. On one side, Zajonc (1998) reviewed evidence that pathways in the brain via emotional structures are faster and more direct than pathways via cognitive structures. On the other side, cognitive appraisal and related theories argue that we analyze the social environment for cues to determine our emotional experience Emotion in Organizations 9 (James, 1884; Lazarus, 1991; Schacter & Singer, 1962). However, in either case, a direct link from stimulus to experience is not tenable because—at some level, however minimal—a stimulus must be registered for it to evoke an emotional reaction. Even a subconscious level of awareness and processing is sufficient to bring a stimulus into the emotion process (Leventhal & Scherer, 1987; Garcia-Prieto, Bellard, & Schneider, 2003; Zajonc, 1998). I label the intervening stage emotional registration rather than appraisal in order to incorporate both this automatic subconscious processing as well as more explicit cognitive interpretation. Even so, it is worth noting that the nomenclature of cognitive appraisal has tended mislead people into a false dichotomy of automatic vs. controlled stimulus registration—where the term cognitive has suggested that appraisal is verbal, conscious, deliberate, logical, and slow (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). Even controlled appraisals tend to occur quickly and with little awareness because they are overlearned—after all, we practice appraising the events of greatest relevance to us, and so for relevant events the process is likely to be well practiced. Indeed, the lack of conscious awareness of the registration process—the sense that our emotional reactions are clear and free of subjective interpretation—often prevents individuals within organizational settings from questioning and evaluating their appraisals. There are three steps within the emotional registration process: attention, schemata, and feeling rules: 1. Attention. The first step in emotional registration is attention—not necessarily conscious attention, but literally that the actor’s sensory organs are oriented to take in the stimulus. At its most minimal, a pre-conscious exposure of several hundred milliseconds may be enough to register a stimulus, but not when looking elsewhere. For example, placing a physical barrier to prevent participants from seeing each other limits the impact of participants’ mood on their interaction partners (Carnevale & Isen, 1986; Howard & Gengler, 2001). Attention can also include deliberate attention as people learn over time which events are ordinary—and thus ignorable—and which are worth taking notice. 2. Schemata. Emotional registration also involves an act of sensemaking: “What does an event Emotion in Organizations 10 mean?” (Weick et al., 2005; p. 410) Basic emotions theorists in psychology argue that we are hard-wired to code events automatically in terms of their meaning for the self (Ekman, 1992; Frijda, 1986; Scherer, 1995). The cognitive appraisal process is an ordered sequence of checklists that direct our attention soonest to the most pressing emotional challenges (Scherer, 1984). The initial rudimentary checks are “rapid automatic processing on a schematic level” (Scherer, 1995; p. 245) that do not require effort or even awareness. The earliest dimension is novelty—indeed whether a stimulus is worth noting, consciously or even subliminally (Frijda, 1986; Scherer, 1984). Scherer (1995) argues that the next dimensions are the inherent pleasantness of a stimulus, its relevance to our goals, our potential for coping with the situation, followed by others that proceed in a conditional order based on the answers to the first set. Other theorists have proposed slightly different appraisal dimensions, with the most comprehensive list including: pleasantness, attentional activity (approach vs. avoid vs. ignore), anticipated effort (active vs. passive), initial causal agent (self vs. other), current control (self vs. other vs. no one), certainty (comprehendible and predictable), perceived goal obstruction, consistency with norms or social standards, and fairness (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985). This sequence has also been described as two stages, with an initial primary appraisal of pleasantness, and a subsequent secondary appraisal including all the remaining dimensions that involve more complex meaning and analysis (Lazarus, 1991). Although appraisal checks even for complex dimensions can become intuitive and automatic, even when appraisal does not require conscious thought we have the option to suspend the process in motion—for example, taking the time to figure out whether a colleague was serious or just kidding. Taken together, the results of these checks distinguish among five basic families of emotion: approach (interest, hope, anticipation), achievement (e.g., relief, satisfaction, contentment, pride, joy), deterrence (anxiety, fear, distress), withdrawal (sadness, shame, resignation), and antagonism (irritation, anger, hate; Scherer & Tran, 2001). Over time the memory of higher-order dimensions fade away as we forget about the specific event, but moods can linger on as emotions “divorced from their antecedents” Emotion in Organizations 11 (Cropanzano, Weiss, Hale, & Reb, 2003, p. 843) with only the pleasantness dimension remaining. The emotional registration process is deeply contextualized. Being hit by a ball could be an attempted injury, clumsiness, or an invitation to play. A strategic issue facing managers could mean a threat or an opportunity (Jackson & Dutton, 1988). Indeed, evaluations along the appraisal dimensions are socially constructed, situation specific and—because they are in the eyes of the beholder—neither true or false (Zajonc, 1998). Wrzesniewski et al. (2003) argue that tasks at work do not have inherent meaning, but that meaning is developed around interpersonal cues from others. Thus, there is great variability in the emotional reactions that an event can invoke. For example, Scherer and Ceschi (2000) showed that the same eliciting event, the loss of baggage for airline passengers, evoked a range of states including anger, sadness, indifference, worry, and even humor. Although strong situations such as mortal dangers may be interpreted consistently, the link between stimulus and experience needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the range and diversity of human environments. Cognitive appraisal theory is under-appreciated for its power to shed light on phenomena central to organizations. The fact that we are hard-wired to appraise events along these sequential dimensions suggests that the judgments correspond to our most pressing concerns inside and outside of organizations. For example, Frost (2003) argued that individuals within organizations feel pain based on how their organizations appear to respond to events, rather than the events themselves—particularly as related to the dimensions of responsibility, fairness, certainty, control, and the ability to cope with current conditions. Likewise, procedural justice research emphasizes the importance of the fairness and control dimensions over that of valence (Lind & Tyler, 1988). In the domain of leadership, Dasborough’s (2006) interview study yielded a set of categories of leader behaviors that included awareness and respect, motivation and inspiration, empowerment, communication, reward and recognition, and accountability—corresponding closely to many of the appraisal dimensions. Also, counterfactual thinking is likely to weigh heavily in the appraisal process, particularly given the inclusion of a certainty Emotion in Organizations 12 dimension, as we compare the state of the world to what we expected it might be. When consideration of such counterfactuals leads to regret, it is stronger for outcomes that were under our own control, for outcomes that resulted from action vs. inaction, and for unexpected events (Mellers, 2000). Power is woven throughout the appraisal process, given that higher power actors are more likely to approach vs. avoid, to be active vs. passive, to act as initial causal agents, to be in control currently, and to enforce others’ adherence to norms and social standards (Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003). Taken together, high power provides greater flexibility to hold others accountable for negative outcomes and themselves for positive outcomes—leading to more anger and contempt vs. sadness, and more pride vs. gratitude (Morris & Keltner, 2000; Tiedens, 2001). The appraisal dimension of fairness connects it intricately with the concepts of justice and voice (Judge, Scott & Ilies, 2006; Smith & Ellsworth, 1985; Weiss et al., 1999), which, by definition, are always affective events. Sensemaking is an organizational construct that Weick et al. (2005) argued often accompanies an emotional experience. Thus, the chronologically earliest appraisal—novelty—is related to expectancy violation and thus a precursor to macro-level sensemaking (Weick et al., 2005). Finally, diversity can influence and be influenced by the appraisal process. It has been a challenge for researchers to reconcile the discrepant pattern of findings showing alternately that diversity is a help vs. hindrance for individuals and groups (Williams & O’Reilly, 1998). Recently GarciaPrieto, Bellard, and Schneider (2003) argued that these conflicting findings may relate to organization members’ emotional appraisals. First, diversity may have no effect if it is not perceived as novel and, thus, not to be appraised. Further, biases in interpreting in-group vs. out-group behavior and cultural differences in implicit theories such as those regarding control, certainty, and fit with norms can feed into the judgments made for the appraisal checks. Taken together, members of diverse groups can appraise different events and can appraise the same events differently. 3. Feeling Rules. The appraisal process, like many exercises in decision making, begins with at least some sense of the desired answer. Although the process of applying appraisal dimensions to events Emotion in Organizations 13 appears to be universal across individuals and even cultural groups (Scherer & Wallbott, 1994), exactly how one applies them is a formula all his or her own. Feeling rules refer to the chronic goals of the registration process. They include a sense of how one should feel, including an emotional category as well as features such as intensity and duration, and can be verbally described just like any other norm (Hochschild, 1979). Most often, these desired states are to experience the most positive and the least negative affect (Frijda, 1988). In this sense, the entire field of motivation is relevant to the extent that motivations are goals for particular experiences, and emotion indicates whether goals are realized (Buck, 1988). Feeling rules also include one’s regulatory focus to approach pleasure vs. avoid pain (Brockner & Higgins, 2001) and psychodynamic concepts such as defense mechanisms and drives, which have a role in directing the emotional appraisal process (Scherer, 1995). Some of the early pioneers of organizational behavior focused on workers’ emotional needs (Maslow, 1943; Hertzberg, 1966). Such needs lead us to shape our actual environment as well as our interpretation of it, in such a way to lead to the desired emotional states. C. Emotional Experience Emotional experience is the closest process in Figure 1 to what is colloquially described as emotion—the psychological and physiological sense of being affected emotionally by an event (Frijda, 1986). “From moments of frustration or joy, grief or fear, to an enduring sense of dissatisfaction or commitment,” Ashforth and Humphrey (1995) argued, “the experience of work is saturated with feeling” (p. 98). Large-scale qualitative studies of workplace events and narratives reveal the widest range of sentiment provoked within organizations, with positive experiences of pride, belongingness, fulfillment, relief, excitement, optimism, affection, nostalgia, empowerment, and joy, and negative experiences of disappointment, fatigue and strain, bitterness and resentment, anger, indignation, rage, embarrassment, pain, disgust, surprise and shock, regret, guilt, sorrow, fear, desperation, uncertainty, rejection, worry, and frustration (Basch & Fisher, 2000; Boudens, 2005). Workers report greater variety in their negative Emotion in Organizations 14 emotions (Dasborough, 2006), which is consistent with cognitive appraisal theory in that one need not complete the ordered checklist in the absence of pressing challenges (Scherer, 1984). Feelings within organizations are often mixed and ambivalent (Fong, 2006; Pratt & Doucet, 2000). Multiple feeling rules can conflict, for example when high-powered women face discrepant scripts for achievement and gender (Fong & Tiedens, 2002). Further, stimuli can be complex, with multiple answers to the appraisal checks and, therefore, multiple emotions elicited. For example, organizational change is a highly complex and salient emotion-eliciting event (George & Jones, 2001; Huy, 1999). Indeed, Vince (2006) found that senior managers of a firm undergoing an acquisition experienced a range of different emotions— from anger at themselves and others to shame, agony, sadness, powerlessness, depression, and fear—based on which aspects of the multi-faceted event they considered. There is a temptation in the management literature to argue for the inherent goodness of positive emotion and the inherent badness of negative emotion. However, both result from the same emotional registration process and evolved alongside each other. Social functional theorists have long argued that even unpleasant emotions have valuable roles for social and work life (e.g., Fridlund, 1994; Keltner & Haidt, 1999). Whereas positive emotions are rewards, negative emotions are warnings and punishments (Larsen & Ketalaar, 1989). Positive mood is crucial for daily functioning and cooperation, yet negative mood is critical for response to survival situations (Spoor & Kelly, 2004; Zajonc, 1998). S. E. Taylor’s (1991) mobilization-minimization theory of negative emotion argues that initial mobilization processes galvanize internal resources to direct attention and behavior towards solving the problem at hand, and over time minimization processes attempt to soften and repair the impact of the negative event. Consistent with this notion that negative emotions are adaptive orienting responses, negative vs. positive work events appear to loom larger for employees. In an experience-sampling study, Miner, Glomb, and Hulin (2005) found that the effect on workers’ mood was five times stronger for negative than positive events, in spite of positive events occurring three to five times as often. Similarly, workers Emotion in Organizations 15 can better recall negative events and negative events have a greater impact on them (Dasborough, 2006). Negative mood is more likely to spill across the work-family boundary than positive mood (Williams & Alliger, 1994), and colleagues converge more strongly in their negative vs. positive moods (Bartel & Saavedra, 2000). This may explain the vast research literature on stress in organizational settings. Stress has been defined as “an unpleasant emotional experience associated with elements of fear, dread, anxiety, irritation, annoyance, anger, sadness, grief and depression” (Motowildo, Packard, & Manning, 1986), which is a type of negative emotional experience (Scherer, 1995). Its pernicious effects result from ignoring its helpful side—stress is supposed to be a warning signal for the need to change, but its underlying causes often do not get changed in spite of the warning. Even anger in the workplace can be beneficial when used within its intended role as an emotion of moral justice that provokes us to confront an obstacle or offender to change the behavior of another (Dilorio & Nusbaumer, 1993; Morris & Keltner, 2000). However, anger has been increasingly considered an overly disruptive state to be regulated heavily (Dilorio & Nusbaumer, 1993; Wharton & Erickson, 1993) and is rarely put to productive use. 1. Individual differences. Organizational actors carry with them their emotional history that includes traces of their past emotional experiences (Fineman, 1996). Over time, we use our emotional experiences to refine the schemas used in stimulus registration, as we encounter events repeatedly and become more adept at interpreting their meaning. Then, in turn, we use these repeated schemas as a lens to interpret new events, in a process that can be self-fulfilling. The chronic experience of sadness can lead us to interpret more events as sad, which makes us sadder. There is a reciprocal influence between emotional states and traits, connected by our systematic interpretive lenses. Recent theories argue that the distinction between emotional states and traits can be blurry and that, indeed, traits merely refer to the likelihood of experiencing particular states (Fleeson, 2001; Larsen & Ketelaar, 1991). Everyone is capable of experiencing every emotion, but practice makes perfect. Dispositions are attribution styles incorporated into the feeling rules and schemas that we use to interpret Emotion in Organizations 16 our world. Support for this perspective comes from research showing that emotional dispositions such as negative affect, neuroticism, optimism, and extraversion influence participants’ unique reactions to standardized emotion elicitors (Brief, Butcher, & Roberson, 1995; Larsen & Ketelaar, 1989; Watson & Clark, 1984), as well as evidence that affective states and their corresponding traits tend to have similar influences on resulting behaviors and cognitions (George, 1991; Lerner & Keltner, 2001). It is worth noting that, in addition to this assimilation effect that occurs when we travel a well-practiced emotional registration—whether or not it quite fits the new situation—our chronic schemas can also create contrast effects when we develop new benchmarks to evaluate stimuli not on absolute terms, but with respect to recent experience (Fuller, Stanton, Fisher, Spitzmuller, Russell, & Smith, 2003). In developing these benchmarks, Frijda (1988) argued that we can more easily habituate to positive experiences—thus, creating a hedonic treadmill in which ever-greater pleasure is required for positive experience—whereas the impact of negative stimuli is less malleable to recent experience. Within organizational research, by far the most common focus on affective traits has been the appraisal dimension of intrinsic pleasantness, as examined in bipolar models of mood. In contrast with basic emotions theories that argue that we experience distinct categories of emotion, the circumplex model of affect attempts to map these categories into a two-dimensional space. In one version, one axis refers to valence or hedonic tone—the intrinsic pleasantness of a stimulus—and the other axis refers to the level of intensity of activation (Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999). A second version of the model rotates these axes 45 degrees so that they refer to high-low positive affect and high-low negative affect, which are defined as the tendency to experience positive and negative states, respectively (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988). Contrasting these two models has been controversial, particularly because the rotated version suggests that the experience of positive and negative states are independent—a finding that appears to be an artifact of examining only half of the circumplex by sampling exclusively from intense experiences (Cropanzano, Weiss, Hale & Reb, 2003; Feldman Barrett & Russell, 1999). Even so, the Emotion in Organizations 17 rotated model has been highly influential and has generated extensive empirical work within organizational settings. Individuals high in positive affect are more focused externally on promoting positive outcomes, where individuals high in negative affect are more focused internally on preventing negative outcomes (Diener & Larsen, 1984; Higgins, 1998; Larsen & Ketalaar, 1989). Positive vs. negative affect also map onto promotion vs. prevention regulatory focus, respectively (Brockner & Higgins, 2001). Individuals high vs. low in negative affect self-report more negative events, especially subjective events, and report that these events have a longer and more intense negative impact on them (Aquino, Grover, Bradfield, & Allen, 1999; Burke, Brief, & George, 1993; Grandey, Tam, & Brauburger, 2002). Likewise, individuals high in positive affect are more reactive to positive workplace events and less reactive to negative events (Frederickson, 2001; Miner et al., 2005). There is enough evidence that affective experience overlaps with self-reported perceptions of objective job characteristics—such as stressors—to suggest that positive and negative affect form a powerful lens rendering even straightforward reports of one’s work environment unreliable (Bagozzi & Yi, 1990; Burke et al., 1993; Saavedra & Kwun, 2000). These differences in affective experience feed into worker’s subjective well-being, perhaps tautologically given that one definition of well-being is that people “feel many pleasant and few unpleasant emotions” (Diener, 2000, p. 34). Other affective personality traits have received less attention but are fertile ground for organizational research. In theory, every dimension of cognitive appraisal could be subject to individual idiosyncrasies in its use and overuse (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). For example, related to the appraisal of coping potential, individuals differ chronically in feelings of control over stressful situations (Williams & Alliger, 1994). Related to fairness, for example, individuals in economic games differ in terms of whether they prefer fair vs. greedy behavior (Haselhuhn & Mellers, 2005). Given the definition of creativity as ideas or solutions that are both new and useful (Amabile, 1983), appraisals of novelty and goal relevance could relate to individual differences in creativity. Likewise, micro-management could relate to Emotion in Organizations 18 appraisals of control and blame, risk behavior to certainty, obstinacy to goal obstruction, whistle blowing to social standards and norms, and old-fashioned laziness could relate to anticipated effort. In the absence of higher-order emotional appraisals, intensity is the other axis of the unrotated circumplex describing mood states. Just as there are individual differences in the predominance of positive vs. negative experiences, there are also individual differences in the predominance of high vs. low intensity emotions (Feldman, 1995). Indeed, what we often mean when describing a person as emotional is that they experience their emotions—any emotions—intensely. There has been relatively little research in organizational settings on stable individual differences in affective intensity, with the exception of Weiss et al. (1999) who found that self-reported affective intensity predicted greater variation in actual moods as assessed by experience sampling. Classic research on arousal has examined intensity of experience at the intrapersonal level (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908), and could be extended fruitfully to the interpersonal realm. As promising as research has been on individual differences, it is important to look beyond them. Emotional experiences start with stimuli, even if personality serves as an interpretive lens. Accordingly, a great deal of variation in affective states is intra-personal (Weiss et al., 1999)—indeed, the majority, according to recent experience-sampling studies of mood pleasantness (56%; Miner et al., 2005) and state hostility (53%; Judge, Scott, & Ilies, 2006). This is more than sampling error. For example, variation can occur in daily cycles (Weiss et al., 1999). Strong situations can overwhelm the impact of personality. For example, some jobs are inherently more stressful than others (Motowildo, Packard, & Manning, 1986). 2. Physiology. Although there is a long debate regarding whether mental awareness of feeling states precedes physiological arousal or vice versa (e.g., Zajonc, 1998; James, 1884; Schachter & Singer, 1962), the two cannot easily be separated. Indeed, James (1884) argued that fear without awareness of one’s heartbeat, breathing, muscle tenseness and trembling can hardly be considered fear. Emotions induce short-term and long-term changes to bodily functioning. In the short term, psychophysiological Emotion in Organizations 19 responses are set in motion immediately upon registering a stimulus, and can take a few seconds to course through the body (Zajonc, 1998). These physical changes that accompany emotional experience are responsible, for example, for the experience of anger as smoldering hot and fear as shivering cold (Scherer, 1984). In the long term, the effects of short-term physiological changes accumulate and affect the body. Hochschild (1983) referred to emotional stamina as the ability to express emotion for long periods of time without negative effects on one’s physiological state. For example, the increased rate of hypertension among individuals prone to stress speaks to the harmful effects of heightened physiological arousal over time. The classic stressor-stress-strain approach taken by the stress literature (e.g., Beal et al., 2005) can be reconciled with the emotion process model by considering the stressor as a stimulus, stress as the feeling state, and strain as the physiological effect. The potential of psychophysiological markers of emotion to inform processes within organizations is immense and barely tapped. Ashby, Isen, and Turken (1999) proposed a neuropsychological theory of positive affect arguing that positive affect acts by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Heaphy and Dutton (2006) review evidence that positive workplace interactions have beneficial effects on three physiological systems: the cardiovascular system that distributes oxygen and nutrients via the blood, the immune system that heals and defends the body against disease and tissue damage, and the neuroendocrine system that regulates the nervous system and biologically active hormones. Such physical changes suggest mechanisms to explain why positive relationships among colleagues, supervisors, customers, and other stakeholders—such as mentoring and leader-member exchange—can have beneficial consequences beyond the instrumental benefits at stake (Heaphy & Dutton, 2006). Thus, psychophysiology can play a valuable role in elaborating theoretical mechanisms for organizational phenomena. Further, psychophysiological measures can be invaluable for organizational researchers. Although they usually require additional training and equipment for data collection and analysis or collaboration with experts in such methods (Heaphy & Dutton, 2006), they do Emotion in Organizations 20 not require participants’ awareness or willingness to report about their emotions—a great concern in research on emotion (Matthews, Zeidner, & Roberts, 2002; Scherer, 1984). III. Emotional expression Ultimately the very private intrapersonal emotional processes described in the sections above are made public, as our sensemaking efforts become shared in the form of emotional expression and other post-emotional behaviors. Emotionally expressive cues—depicted in the upper right corner of Figure 1— begin with words (Pennebaker, Mehl, & Niederhoffer, 2003), but nonverbal cues are particularly important because organizations often lack a vocabulary for discussing emotional experience (Sandelands, 1988). Nonverbal cues include facial expressions, vocal tone, body language, movement, touching, and physical distance—indeed, essentially any way that the human body can emit movement, sound, or feeling can take on an expressive quality (Allport & Vernon, 1933). On the intrapersonal level, expression has a value in itself. Indeed, Zajonc (1998) argued that the term emotional expression is preemptive, implying through its very name the argument that physical cues are intended as a signal of internal states. According to vascular efference theory, facial cues and head movements feed back into emotional experience, via the regulation of blood flow and brain temperature (Tomkins & McCarter, 1964; Zajonc, 1998). Although this particular argument is specific to the face, afferent feedback also leads individuals to feel internal states consistent with their own vocal tones and body postures (Hatfield, Hsee, Costello, & Weisman, 1995). Even if nonverbal cues are frequently driven by internal experience, the strength of their association can lead the pathway to reverse. A further intrapersonal value to emotional expression is catharsis that helps to terminate unwanted emotional experience. Individuals may vary in the extent to which externalizers discharge emotion using visible emotional expression vs. internalizers who use internal somatic activation (Buck, 1988). On the interpersonal level, emotional expression is one of the most powerful forms of social influence (e.g., Ekman, 1972; Keltner & Haidt, 1999), inside and outside of the workplace. The modern Emotion in Organizations 21 study of emotion as communication leans heavily on Brunswick’s (1955) lens model of ecological perception—included within the interpersonal process framework in Figure 2—in which properties such as emotional states are associated probabilistically with specific external cues and, in turn, these cues are perceived probabilistically by a judge trying to infer the property. Although emotional expression has often been studied in organizational settings on its own, the lens model implies that expression needs to be considered in terms of how it is perceived by others. The influential social function perspective on emotion has emphasized its adaptive implications as communication (DePaulo & Friedman, 1998; McArthur & Baron, 1983; Morris & Keltner, 2000). Evolutionarily, the emotions with the clearest physical signals are those for which it is generally adaptive to inform others—such as fear and anger, but not boredom (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000). Keltner and Haidt (1999) outlined three mechanisms by which the communication of emotions evolved as adaptive responses to social living. First, emotional expressions efficiently convey information about reactions to the shared environment, beliefs, social intentions, and feedback towards others. Second, emotional expressions tend to evoke emotional responses in others that help to solve the problems of group living, for example embarrassment can elicit forgiveness, and pain can elicit sympathy. Anger is intended to induce others to adjust irritating behavior, and can evoke a range of emotions from fear and guilt, if the implicit appraisal of blame is accepted, or a spiral of anger otherwise. Third, emotions can serve in operant conditioning as rewards or punishments, and promises or threats of possible future rewards or punishments. For example, male managers in a simulated employment setting offered greater praise to those female subordinates to whom they offered low tangible compensation (Vescio, Gervais, Snyder, & Hoover, 2005). Morris and Keltner (2000) describe social functions of anger to punish others for misdeeds, gratitude to reward others for cooperating, guilt to spur efforts to repair relationship harm, contempt to signal to someone their lower status, and shame to signal a transgressor’s regret without need for formal punishment. They argue that the social functional perspective does not mean that Emotion in Organizations 22 emotions are always functional—particularly at any given level of analysis—but rather that each emotion evolved with a function that it can serve, even if it does not always do so. These functions are the reason not merely to be happy all the time—we would lose the evolutionary value of negative emotion. Social functions help in resolving conflicts, appeasement, dividing resources fairly, and generally maintaining effective relationships (Morris & Keltner, 2000). Emotion as spontaneous vs. deliberate communication has been hotly debated (Parkinson, 2005). At one extreme, Ekman (1972) argued that expression is primarily a spontaneous readout of internal states, and shows true emotion at all times except when managed with conscious effort. However, empirical evidence appears to favor more moderate positions, particularly Fridlund’s (1994) behavioral ecology theory in which social audience factors heavily into emotional expression, even with internal sates and conscious management held constant. Scherer (1988) distinguished between spontaneous push factors caused by the feeling and physiology of emotional experience—such as bodily changes like accelerated breath or shaking—vs. pull factors caused by social intentions to communicate. He further distinguished between pull factors that convey information vs. make a specific appeal for action. For example, an expression of fear could signify frozen terror, a deliberate signal that danger is nearby, or a request to extricate the expressor from the scary situation. Pull factors have been investigated largely under the umbrella of display rules, to be described below in the section on display regulation. Push factors include biologically determined affect programs as well as cultural and individual expressive style, with evidence largely based on cross-cultural research. Classic studies demonstrated that emotional expressions can be recognized across cultural groups at accuracy levels greater than chance guessing alone, which suggests that a core of expression is universal and biologically programmed (Ekman, 1972, 1992; Russell, 1994). Indeed, as most people living with pets would agree, basic emotional messages can also transcend species boundaries. However, some of the message gets lost along the way. There is an in-group advantage favoring the understanding of Emotion in Organizations 23 emotional expressions that originate from members of one’s own cultural group (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2003). A recent dialect theory of emotion argues that cultural groups vary subtly yet systematically in the cues they use to express emotion, and judgments are more accurate for expressions that use a familiar style (Elfenbein, Beaupré, Lévesque, & Hess, 2006). These cultural dialects are more than the overlearned conscious management of expression, in that they develop from random variation across isolated groups and do not necessarily serve a social function. Even within cultures, individuals develop unique expressive styles. Personality theorists have examined individual differences in the intensity of expressive displays (Halberstadt, 1986; Gross & John, 1998). In addition to intensity, individuals may also differ in the particular cues use for the same displays (Elfenbein, Foo, Tan, & Boldry, 2006). The appearance of expressive displays may differ based on whether they are created by push vs. pull factors. Spontaneous expressions are more symmetrical, more consistent in their duration, and can use different expressive cues (Rinn, 1984). Observers can detect some of these differences, most notably the difference between the Duchenne smile with both lip corner retraction and wrinkles around the eyes vs. the non-Duchenne smile with only lip corner retraction—often known as the authentic vs. fake smile, respectively. For example, Scherer and Ceschi (2000) found that airline employees judged the good humor of their passengers with lost baggage based on fake vs. authentic smiling. Grandey, Fisk, Mattila, Jansen, and Sideman (2005) found that authentic vs. fake smiling enhanced customer satisfaction and perceptions of friendliness in simulated hotel and actual restaurant settings. Push vs. pull factors can also influence the channel of communication through which cues are expressed. Ekman and Friesen (1969) proposed a hierarchy of nonverbal expressive cues from the most controllable to the most leaky. They argued that facial expressions are more controllable and provide more feedback from the self and others, compared to leakier channels such as the body and voice. Voluntary cues tend to be expressed via facial expressions, whereas the cues expressed via leakier channels tend to be more spontaneous. Emotional expressions likely fall along a continuum between push and pull factors, in that we can exhibit varying Emotion in Organizations 24 levels of intentional control. Facial expressions can give us away, and with practice even leaky channels can be controlled. Most research on emotional expression within organizational settings focuses on its regulation, and is discussed at length in the section on display regulation below. IV. Emotion Regulation Each of the emotion processes reviewed above—from a stimulus to registration, experience, and expression—can be brought under at least partial voluntary control via emotion regulation processes that are unique to each stage (Frijda, 1988), depicted in the gray shaded area of Figure 1. Gross’ (2001) pioneering model of emotion regulation emphasizes that there are distinct regulation strategies across the particular stages of emotion, and argues that attempts to regulate chronologically earlier tend to be more effective than those attempts later in the emotion process. A. Regulating Stimuli. Although the emotion process framework starts with a stimulus in the environment, people choose their environments (Buss, 1987; Diener, Larsen, & Emmons, 1984). Situation selection, or limiting exposure to situations that evoke undesired emotions and increasing exposure to those evoking desired states, is the chronologically earliest form of regulation within the emotion process (Gross, 1998). Different work environments make different affective events more or less likely (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). At some level, every choice that an employee makes is an affective event. We use our anticipated emotions in order to guide decision making (Lowenstein & Lerner, 2003; Mellers, 2000), and thus the decision making process looks forward through the emotion process and selects situations that will expose us to desired emotional experiences and avoid unwanted ones. However, this process of affective forecasting in anticipating our future emotions is imperfect, and suffers from biases such as over reliance on momentarily salient issues, and underestimating our resilience against negative events and habituation to positive events (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998; Loewenstein & Emotion in Organizations 25