Do Enterprises Have Emotions?

Emotional language of human individuals has been studied for quite a while dealing with opinions and value judgments people have and share with others. In our work, we take a different stance and investigate whether large organizations, such as major industrial players, have and communicate emotions, as well. Such an anthropomorphic perspective has recently been advocated in management and organization studies which consider organizations as social actors. We studied this assumption by analyzing 1,676 annual business and sustainability reports from 90 top-performing enterprises in the United States, Great Britain and Germany. We compared the measurements of emotions in this homogeneous corporate text corpus with those from RCV1, a heterogeneous Reuters newswire corpus. From this, we gathered empirical evidence that business reports compare well with typical emotion-neutral economic news, whereas sustainability reports are much more emotionally loaded, similar to emotion-heavy sports and fashion news from Reuters. Furthermore, our data suggest that these emotions are distinctive and relatively stable over time per organization, thus constituting an emotional profile for enterprises.