Course Organizational Behavior

Subject Emotions and Moods

1. What Are Emotions and Moods?

Three terms that are closely intertwined: affect, emotion, and moods.

Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of feelings people experience. This includes both
emotions and moods. Emotions are intense feelings that are directed at someone or something. Moods
are the feelings that tend to be less intense than emotions and that lack a contextual stimulus.

1.1. The Basic Emotions

Though not all psychologists agree, there do seem to be six basic emotions that emerge in
studies: anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise. All other emotions fall under these six
categories. Sometimes as many as 12 emotions are identified.

1.2. Moral Emotions

Researchers have been studying what are called moral emotions; that is, emotions that have
moral implications because of our instant judgement of the situation that evokes them. Interestingly,
research indicates that our responses to moral emotions differ from our responses to other emotions.
Moral emotions are developed during childhood as children learn moral norms and standards, so they
depend upon the situation and norms more so than other emotions. Because morality is a construct
that differs between cultures, so do moral emotions. Therefore, we need to be aware of the moral
aspects of situations that trigger our emotions and make certain we understand the context before we
act, especially in the workplace.
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Subject Emotions and Moods

1.3. The Basic Moods

Our basic moods carry positive and negative affects. They cannot be neutral. Emotions are
grouped into general mood states as shown in Exhibit 4-2. These states impact how employees
perceive reality; thereby, the moods can impact the work of employees. At zero input, most people
experience a mildly positive mood. This is referred to as positivity offset.

1.4. Experiencing Moods and Emotions

As if it weren’t complex enough to consider the many distinct emotions and moods a person
might identify, the reality is that we all experience moods and emotions differently. For most people,
positive moods are somewhat more common than negative moods. Indeed, research finds a positivity
offset, meaning that at zero input (when nothing in particular is going on), most individuals experience
a mildly positive mood. Does the degree to which people experience positive and negative emotions
vary across cultures? Yes (see the OB Poll). People in most cultures appear to experience certain
positive and negative emotions, and people interpret them in much the same way worldwide.
However, an individual’s experience of emotions appears to be culturally shaped.
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Subject Emotions and Moods

1.5. The Function of Emotions

Do emotions make us irrational? There are some who think that emotions are linked to
irrationality and that expressing emotions in public may be damaging to your career or status.
However, research has shown that emotions are necessary for rational thinking. They help us make
better decisions and help us understand the world around us. If we are going to make decisions, we
need to incorporate both thinking and feeling.
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Subject Emotions and Moods

Do emotions make us ethical?

A growing body of research has begun to examine the relationship between emotions and
moral attitudes. Examples of moral emotions include sympathy for the suffering of others, guilt about
our own immoral behavior, anger about injustice done to others, contempt for those who behave
unethically, and disgust at violations of moral norms. Numerous studies suggest that these reactions
are largely based on feelings rather than on cognition.

Our beliefs are shaped by our groups, which influence our perceptions of the ethicality behind
certain situations, resulting in unconscious responses and a shared moral emotion.” Unfortunately,
these shared emotions may allow us to justify purely emotional reactions as “ethical” just because we
share them with others.

We also tend to judge (and punish) outgroup members (anyone who is not in our group) more
harshly for moral transgressions than ingroup members, even when we are trying to be objective. In
addition, we tend to glorify ingroup members (anyone who is a part of our group) and are more lenient
when judging their misdeeds, often leading to a double-standard in ethicality.

2. Sources of Emotions and Moods

There are many things that impact our mood and emotions. Personality is a key component
and will definitely impact the intensity of the emotions we feel. Affectively intense people experience
both positive and negative emotions more deeply: When they’re sad, they2re really sad, and when
they’re happy, they’re really happy.

The day and time of the week is a common pattern for all of us as well. Exhibit 4-3 in your text
shows the results of recent research related to time of day. Positive emotions have their greatest effect
in mid-morning and then remain stable before rising again until midnight.

In Exhibit 4-4, we can see how the day of the week affects emotions. As the week progresses,
positive effects of emotions increase while negative effects decrease. So positive emotions are
considerably higher toward the end of the week than they are at the beginning. This tends to be true
among many cultures.
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Subject Emotions and Moods
Course Organizational Behavior
Subject Emotions and Moods
Course Organizational Behavior
Subject Emotions and Moods

Weather

Weather is thought to have an impact on our emotions, but there is no proven effect.

Stress

Stress is an important factor and even at low levels it can cause our mood to change. It is
important to maintain a low level of stress to help control psychological and physical health.

Social Activities

Social activities have been shown to have a positive impact on our moods. This could be
physical outlets such as playing in a basketball league, or as simple as going out to dinner with friends.

Sleep

Some additional sources of emotion and moods include such factors as sleep and exercise. It
is important to get enough and high-quality levels of sleep.

Exercise

Physical activity can also aid in keeping our moods upbeat, particularly for people who are
depressed.

Age

Some characteristics that are beyond our control can impact our moods, such as age and sex.
Elderly people tend to have fewer negative emotions. Older adults tend to focus on more positive
stimuli (and on less negative stimuli) than younger adults, a finding confirmed across nearly 100
studies. Furthermore, these older adults tend to self-regulate by actively trying to increase the
positivity (and decrease the negativity) in their attention and memory.

Sex

Women tend to express their emotions readily and their moods tend to last longer. Research
has shown that this is due more to cultural socialization than to biology. People also tend to attribute
men’s and women’s emotions in ways that might be based on stereotypes of typical emotional
reactions.

3. Emotional Labor

In many jobs, there is an implied agreement on the types of emotions that should be
expressed. For example, waitresses are supposed to be friendly and cheerful, whether they are
currently feeling that emotion or not.
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Subject Emotions and Moods

An employee’s actual emotions are their felt emotions. The emotions that are required or
deemed appropriate by the employer are called displayed emotions. Displaying fake emotions requires
suppressing real ones and acting.

Surface acting occurs when an employee displays the appropriate emotions even when he or
she don’t feel those emotions. Deep acting occurs when the employee actually changes his or her
internal feelings to match display rules; this level of acting can be very stressful.

When employees must project one emotion while feeling another, this disparity is called
emotional dissonance. Bottled-up feelings of frustration, anger, and resentment can lead to emotional
exhaustion. Long-term emotional dissonance is a predictor for job burnout, declines in job
performance, and lowers job satisfaction. However, research from Germany and Australia suggests
that employees who have a high capacity for self-control, who get a daily good night’s sleep on a daily
basis, and who have strong relationships with their customers or clients tend to be buffered to some
degree from the negative side effects of emotional dissonance.

4. Affective Events Theory

Affective Events Theory, or AET, demonstrates that employees react emotionally to things that
happen to them at work, which can influence their job performance and job satisfaction. The intensity
of these responses will be based on emotion and mood.

In sum, AET offers two important messages. First, emotions provide valuable insights into how
workplace events influence employee performance and satisfaction. Second, employees and managers
shouldn’t ignore emotions or the events that cause them, even when they appear minor, because they
accumulate.

5. Emotional Intelligence

Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer coined the term ‘Emotional Intelligence’ in 1990 describing it
as “a form of social intelligence that involves the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and
emotions, to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and action”.
Salovey and Mayer also initiated a research program intended to develop valid measures of emotional
intelligence and to explore its significance. For instance, they found in one study that when a group of
people saw an upsetting film, those who scored high on emotional clarity (which is the ability to
identify and give a name to a mood that is being experienced) recovered more quickly. In another
study, individuals who scored higher in the ability to perceive accurately, understand, and appraise
others’ emotions were better able to respond flexibly to changes in their social environments and build
supportive social networks.
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Subject Emotions and Moods

In the 1990’s Daniel Goleman became aware of Salovey and Mayer’s work, and this eventually
led to his book, Emotional Intelligence. Goleman was a science writer for the New York Times,
specialising in brain and behaviour research. He trained as a psychologist at Harvard where he worked
with David McClelland, among others. McClelland was among a growing group of researchers who
were becoming concerned with how little traditional tests of cognitive intelligence told us about what
it takes to be successful in life.

Goleman argued that it was not cognitive intelligence that guaranteed business success but
emotional intelligence. He described emotionally intelligent people as those with four characteristics:

1. They were good at understanding their own emotions (self-awareness)

2. They were good at managing their emotions (self-management)

3. They were empathetic to the emotional drives of other people (social awareness)

4. They were good at handling other people’s emotions (social skills)1

Emotional Intelligence is a person’s ability to be self-aware, which is to recognize his or her

own experienced emotions and to understand them. More significantly is the ability to observe and
detect emotion in others, and to regulate the emotions in a cascading relationship. People who know
their emotions and can read emotional cues are likely to be most effective.

1
https://www.emotionalintelligencecourse.com/history-of-eq/
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Subject Emotions and Moods

5. Emotion Regulation

The process of identifying and modifying emotions you feel is called emotion regulation. As you might
suspect, not everyone is equally good at regulating emotions. Individuals who are higher in the
personality trait of neuroticism have more trouble doing so and often find their moods are beyond
their ability to control.

The workplace environment has an effect on an individual’s tendency to employ emotion

regulation. In general, diversity in work groups increases the likelihood that you will regulate your
emotions. Racial diversity also has an effect: if diversity is low, the minority will engage in emotion
regulation, perhaps to “fit in” with the majority race as much as possible; if diversity is high and many
different races are represented, the majority race will employ emotion regulation, perhaps to integrate
themselves with the whole group.

These findings suggest a beneficial outcome of diversity—it may cause us to regulate our
emotions more consciously and effectively. It’s important to note that there is a downside to trying to
change the way you feel. The effort involved can be exhausting. From another perspective, research
suggests that avoiding negative emotional experiences is less likely to lead to positive moods than does
seeking out positive emotional experiences.

Emotion Regulation Techniques

Researchers of emotion regulation often study the strategies people employ to change their
emotions. One technique of emotion regulation is emotional suppression, or suppressing initial
emotional responses to situations. This response seems to facilitate practical thinking in the short
term. However, it appears to be helpful only when a strongly negative event would elicit a distressed
emotional reaction during a crisis. Thus, unless we’re truly in a crisis, acknowledging rather than
suppressing our emotional responses to situations, and re-evaluating events after they occur, yields
the best outcomes.

The primary reason why people suppress emotions is that they don’t want to come across as
unlikable. If you break it down, there are a host of psychological reasons why people suppress their
emotions, some directly or indirectly related to maintaining one’s social image:

1. Negative emotions are painful to experience and acknowledge, so suppressing them is a means
to escape them.
2. People want to appear perfect to others and to themselves. So, acknowledging their mistakes
and failures and the feelings associated with them can be hard.
3. Many people believe that expressing negative emotions makes a person appear weak and
lacking control.
4. The positive thinking movement encourages people to ignore their negative emotions. People
don’t want to get labeled as ‘negative’.
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Subject Emotions and Moods

Suppressing our emotions when they need to be expressed causes us to dump them elsewhere on
innocent people if we’re not careful. If we keep on suppressing our negative emotions, they get buried
in our subconscious. This often results in mood swings, unexplained sadness, and mild depression.

Then, when we face a future problem, we won’t just feel bad because of the problem at hand but
also because of these suppressed emotions we’re holding on to. Therefore, the intensity of our bad
emotions will be more than others who face similar problems.

Suppressed emotions that are bottled up intensify over time and express themselves as anger or
aggression outbursts. Studies confirm that bottling up emotions can make people more aggressive.

Suppressed emotions can also leak out in the form of dreams or nightmares. If you’re trying to hide
an emotion in your waking life, it may get expressed in your dreams. If you continue to leave the
emotion unexpressed, you might even get recurring dreams about it.

Suppressing negative emotions may lead to depression, low self-esteem, and even physical illness
in extreme cases. Suppressing emotions is a risk factor in premature death, including death from
cancer.

Research has shown that many illnesses have psychological reasons that are directly or indirectly
related to stress. Suppressing emotions is an effective way to experience chronic stress because it’s
mentally demanding and exhausting.

What emotional suppression does is that it short-circuits the above pathway. It actively tries
to not acknowledge and not feel the emotion. This hinders what the emotion is designed to
accomplish and so it lingers, keeps tugging at your psyche, and intensifies over time2.

2
https://www.psychmechanics.com/effects-of-suppressing-your-emotions/
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Subject Emotions and Moods

Cognitive reappraisal, or reframing our outlook on an emotional situation, is one way to

effectively regulate emotions. This result suggests that cognitive reappraisal may allow people to
change their emotional responses, even when the subject matter is highly emotionally charged.

Cognitive reappraisal involves recognizing the negative pattern your thoughts have fallen into,
and changing that pattern to one that is more effective. Changing the course of your thoughts, or how
you’re making sense of things, can in turn change the course of your emotions, turning the dial down
a couple of notches. Feeling more even-keel, it becomes easier to address whatever triggered the
negative emotions, and to do so skillfully. For example, imagine you take a wrong turn on the way to
a party and end up getting lost, making you considerably late. Your first response may be to get
frustrated, appraising the situation by thinking “This road construction is terrible! The city needs to get
it together to find a different way of detouring traffic.” This appraisal may make you angry. If you are
more prone to anger, your anger may run away with you, causing you to be fuming and ruin your time
at the party once you arrive.

Instead of playing out this unpleasant, seemingly automatic cycle, take a moment to consider
another perspective (reappraisal) you might have in this situation. The mere act of considering other
interpretations can help to loosen your grip on your angrier perspective. Furthermore, other ways of
looking at this situation might cause you to experience other feelings. Consider the following
reappraisals:

· I always get lost. Why can’t I seem to do anything right?

· Oh no! If I’m late to the party, everyone will be angry at me and no one will talk to me.

· I have the birthday cake in the trunk. Now everyone at the party will have to wait for me
before they can get started, and that’s miserable.

These different ways of thinking about the situation will obviously elicit different emotional
responses, although they’re not really an improvement on the first response. What’s interesting about
them is that all of them contain at least a kernel of truth. None of them is out-and-out irrational. Some
of them may be a bit extreme, but not irrational. This is significant because it illustrates there usually
isn’t just one way of making sense of a situation. All are valid. This means it’s possible to take an
alternative perspective that is more effective in helping us feel more balanced.

Now consider the following reappraisals:

· Thank God, I will spare myself 30 minutes of talking to Elizabeth. I dodged a bullet there!

· I’m late again. I might as well enjoy the scenery while I’m driving around.

· People probably won’t care that much that I’m late.

· I’m usually on-time. What a fluke!

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Subject Emotions and Moods

· Life happened.

These appraisals also contain a kernel of truth. They are not merely the “power of positive
thinking,” but reality-based ways of re-appraising the situation. Moreover, they would probably be
more helpful in helping us keep our head while we try to find our way to the party. While running over
these new thoughts, you might still probably hear the old appraisal in your head: “This road
construction is terrible! The city needs to get it together to find a different way of detouring traffic.”
But now you can add some nuance to it, adding different viewpoints, and thinking in a way that keeps
a lid on your level of distress. The point is to allow other ways of making sense of a situation
coexist with the more emotionally triggering appraisal.

The next time you notice yourself getting in one of these emotion-thought feedback loops,
consider a few cognitive reappraisals of the situation, and notice what happens to the volume of your
emotions. Think “What are some alternative explanations?” “What’s really the worst that could
happen, and would I live through it?” “If I were in a better mood, how might I be thinking about this
situation?” Considering a situation from a few angles improves our cognitive flexibility, and can help
us not jump to the same knee-jerk reaction that has us feeling lousy3.

Another technique with potential for emotion regulation is social sharing, or venting. Research
shows that the open expression of emotions can help individuals to regulate their emotions, as
opposed to keeping emotions “bottled up.” Social sharing can reduce anger reactions when people can
talk about the facts of a bad situation, their feelings about the situation, or any positive aspects of the
situation.

A final emotion regulation technique, mindfulness—receptively paying attention to and being

aware of the present moment, events, and experiences—has started to become popular in
organizations.

While mindfulness is innate, it can be cultivated through proven techniques. Here are some
examples:

1. Meditation;

2. Short pauses we insert into everyday life;

3. Merging meditation practice with other activities, such as yoga or sports.

Today, many large corporations and other work organizations are implementing mindfulness
training, including Google, Apple, Proctor and Gamble, as well as the military, prisons, hospitals and
universities.4 However, studies on employee mindfulness are new and we have yet to fully realize its
causes and outcomes, along with the most effective methods for achieving and sustaining mindful
states.

3
https://cogbtherapy.com/cbt-blog/2014/5/4/hhy104os08dekc537dlw7nvopzyi44
4
https://www.oxfordmindfulness.org/news/mindful-organisation-developing-flourishing-workplaces/
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Thus, while there is much promise in emotion regulation techniques, the best route to a
positive workplace is to recruit positive-minded individuals and train leaders to manage their moods,
job attitudes, and performance. The best leaders manage emotions as much as they do tasks and
activities. The best employees can use their knowledge of emotion regulation to decide when to speak
up and how to express themselves effectively.

Ethics of Emotion Regulation

Emotion regulation has important ethical implications. On one end of continuum, some people
might argue that controlling your emotions is unethical because it requires a degree of acting. On the
other end, people might argue that all emotions should be controlled so you can take a dispassionate
perspective. Both arguments- and all arguments in between- have ethical pros and cons that you will
have to decide for yourself. Consider the reasons for emotion regulation and the outcomes. Are you
regulating your emotions so you don’t react inappropriately, or are you regulating your emotions so
no one knows what you’re thinking?

Recent research has found that acting like you are in a good mood might put you in a good
mood. In one study, a group of participants was asked to hold only on an efficient conversation with a
barista serving them at Starbucks, while another group was asked to act happy. The happy actors
reported later that they were in much better moods.

6. Apply Concepts About Emotions and Moods to Specific OB Issues

Understanding emotions and moods can help us explain and predict selection, decision
making, creativity, motivation, leadership, interpersonal conflict, negotiation, customer service, job
attitudes, and deviant workplace behaviors. When it comes to selection, EI should be a hiring factor to
ensure employee fit. Positive emotions can lead to better decisions and often more creative ones as
well.

Positive mood affects expectations of success by all people, which contributes to their
motivation for performance. Leadership is affected by mood and emotion, as people in a positive
emotional state are found to be more receptive of messages from leaders. Emotions, those both held
and displayed, are effective contributors to negotiation, as the potential impact of displayed emotion
on negotiation is large. The best negotiators are probably those who remain emotionally detached.

Emotions affect customer service in a number of ways, ranging from the attitude of the
employee, to the effectiveness of communication with customers, to overall feelings about the
outcome. Research has found that people who are on an emotional high at the end of a day take the
positive feelings home with them, and vice versa. This good mood, however, tends to dissipate
overnight.

Negative emotions can lead to deviant workplace behaviors. These are actions that violate
norms and threaten the organization. Once aggression starts, it’s likely that other people will become
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Subject Emotions and Moods

angry and aggressive, so the stage is set for a serious escalation of negative behavior. Managers,
therefore, need to stay connected with their employees to gauge emotions and emotional intensity
levels. In addition, research has found that workers asked to do dangerous work while in negative
emotional states are more likely to have accidents. Selecting positive team members can have a
contagion effect, as positive moods transmit from team member to team member.

SOURCES

• Robbins S.P. & Judge, T. A. (2019). Organizational Behavior, 18th Edition, Global Edition,
Pearson: United Kingdom.
• Mutlucan, Nigar Çağla. (2019). Örnek Olaylarla Örgütsel Davranış. Beta Yayınları.
• https://hbr.org/2017/02/emotional-intelligence-has-12-elements-which-do-you-need-to-
work-on
• https://www.emotionalintelligencecourse.com/history-of-eq/
• https://www.psychmechanics.com/effects-of-suppressing-your-emotions/
• https://cogbtherapy.com/cbt-blog/2014/5/4/hhy104os08dekc537dlw7nvopzyi44
• https://www.oxfordmindfulness.org/news/mindful-organisation-developing-flourishing-
workplaces/