Chapter 4: Emotions and Moods
What are emotions and moods?
Affect – a broad range of feelings people experience, including both emotions and moods
Emotions – intense feeling directed at someone or something
Moods – feelings that tend to be less intense than emotions and that lack a contextual stimulus
**The Basic Emotions
Happiness-surprise-fear-sadness-anger-disgust
**The Basic Moods: Positive and Negative Affect
*Positive emotions – express a favourable evaluation or feeling
*Negative emotions – express an unfavourable evaluation or feeling
Positivity offset – tendency of most individuals to experience a mildly positive mood at zero
input (when nothing in particular is going on)
Affect intensity – individual differences in the strength with which individuals experience their
emotions
**Sources of Emotions and Moods
Personality, day of week and time of day, weather, stress, social activities, sleep, exercise, age,
sex,
Illusory Correlation – tendency of people to associate two events when in reality there is no
connection
**Emotional Labor – employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal
transaction at work
Emotional dissonance – inconsistencies between the emotions people feel and the emotions
they project
Felt emotions – an individual’s actual emotions
Displayed emotions – emotions that are organizationally required and considered appropriate in
a given job
Surface acting – hiding one’s inner feelings and foregoing emotional expressions in response to
display rules
Deep acting – trying to modify one’s true inner feelings based on display rules
Affective Events Theory – a model that suggests that workplace events cause emotional reactions on the
part of employees, which then influence workplace attitudes and behaviors
Emotional Intelligence – person’s ability to 1) perceive emotions in the self and others, 2) understand
the meaning of these emotions, 3) regulate one’s emotion accordingly in a cascading model
**The Case for EI
-Intuitive appeal
-EI predicts criteria that matter
-EI is biologically based
**The Case Against EI
-EI researchers do not agree on definition
-EI can’t be measured
-EI is nothing but personality with a different label
OB Applications of Emotions and Moods
-selection
-decision making
-creativity
-motivation
-leadership
-negotiation
-customer service
-job attitudes
-deviant workplace behaviors
-safety and injury at work
Emotional Contagion – process by which people’s emotions are caused by the emotions of others