Organizational behavior

Lecture 3
Emotions and Moods

by Dawit H. (Assistant professor)

 Lecture 3 Objectives

After this lecture you should be able to :

 Differentiate between emotions and moods.
 Identify the sources of emotions and moods.
 Display the impact that emotional labor has on
employees.
 Describe emotional intelligence.
 Apply concepts about emotions and moods to
specific OB issues.
1.1 What Are Emotions and Moods?

 Emotions are intense, discrete, and short-lived

feeling experiences that are often caused by a
specific event.
 Moods are longer-lived and less intense feelings than
emotions and often arise without a specific event
acting as a stimulus.
 Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of
feelings, including both emotions and moods.

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The Basic Emotions

 Include anger, contempt, enthusiasm, envy, fear, frustration,
disappointment, embarrassment, disgust, happiness, hate,
hope, jealousy, joy, love, pride, surprise, and sadness.
 Many researchers agree on six universal emotions —anger,
fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise.
Moral emotions are emotions that have moral implications
because of our instant judgment of the situation that evokes
them. E.g. of moral emotions include sympathy for the suffering
of others, guilt about our own immoral behavior, anger about
injustice done to others, etc.

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5.2 Sources of Emotions and Moods

Have you ever snapped at a coworker or family member for no

reason? If you have, you probably wonder where those emotions &
moods originated. Here are some of the primary influences.
 Personality: Moods & emotions have personality trait component,
meaning some people have built-in tendencies to experience
certain moods & emotions more frequently than others do.
 Time of Day: Moods vary by the time of day.
 Day of the Week: Are people in their best moods on the
weekends? In most cultures, they are—for e.g., U.S. adults tend to
experience their highest positive affect on Friday, Saturday, &
Sunday, and their lowest on Monday

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Weather: When do you think you would be in a better mood

— when it’s sunny, or on a gloomy, cold, rainy day? Many
people believe that their mood is tied to the weather.
Social Activities: For most people, social activities increase a
positive mood and have little effect on a negative mood. Also
the type of social activity does matter. Activities that are
physical (hiking with friends), informal (going to a party), or
epicurean (eating with others) are more strongly associated
with increases in positive mood than events that are formal
(attending a meeting) or sedentary (watching TV with friends).

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Sleep: increased regular sleep enhances creativity,

performance, and career success.
Exercise: Research consistently shows that exercise
enhances peoples’ positive moods.
Age: Older adults tend to focus on more positive stimuli
(and on less negative stimuli) than younger adults, a
finding confirmed across nearly 100 studies.
Gender: Evidence does confirm women experience
emotions more intensely, tend to “hold on to” emotions
longer than men.

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5.3 Emotional Labor

 If you’ve ever had a job in retail or in sales, or

waited on tables in a restaurant, you know the
importance of projecting a friendly demeanor and
smiling. Even though there were days when you
didn’t feel cheerful, you knew management expected
you to be upbeat when dealing with customers, so
you faked it.
Emotional labor: It is employee’s expression of
organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal
transactions at work.

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Felt emotions are our actual emotions. In contrast,

displayed emotions are emotions the organization
requires workers to show and considers appropriate in a
given job. They’re not innate; they’re learned, and they
may or may not coincide with felt emotions. For
instance, research suggests that in U.S. workplaces, it is
expected that employees should typically display
positive emotions like happiness and excitement and
suppress negative emotions like fear, anger, disgust, and
contempt.

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Many workplaces have explicit display rules, but

usually only for interactions that matter, particularly
between employees and customers.
Surface acting is hiding feelings and emotional
expressions in response to display rules. A worker who
smiles at a customer even when he doesn’t feel like it is
surface acting. Deep acting is trying to modify our true
feelings based on display rules. Surface acting deals
with displayed emotions, and deep acting deals with felt
emotions.

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5.4 Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) it is the ability to detect

and to manage emotional cues and information.
People who know their own emotions and are good at
reading emotional cues—for instance, knowing why
they’re angry and how to express themselves without
violating norms—are most likely to be effective.
Several studies suggest that EI plays an important role
in job performance, although the survey items are often
strikingly similar to other items from personality,
intelligence, and self-perception tests.

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 Other reviews suggest that EI is related to teamwork

effectiveness as well as deviant and citizenship
behavior.
 South Korean managers with high EI tend to have
better sales figures than those with low EI because
they were able to create more cohesive stores and
improved sales-directed behavior.
 A study undertaken on project managers in the
Australian defense industry examined the
contribution of EI to project success.

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5.2 A Cascading Model of Emotional Intelligence

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1. Sara is constantly annoying people in the office. She speaks

her mind freely without taking into consideration how it will
affect others, doesn't try to smile when she's in a bad mood,
and can't understand why other people are upset with her.
Sara’s inability to be self-aware indicates that she has a very
low ________.
A. Cognitive intelligence
B. Self-esteem
C. Negative affect
D. Job satisfaction
E. Emotional intelligence
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Emotion Regulation Techniques

 Emotional suppression: Suppressing initial emotional
responses to situations.
 Cognitive reappraisal: Reframing our outlook on an
emotional situation.
 Social sharing: It 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.
 Mindfulness: Receptively paying attention to and being
aware of the present moment, events, and experiences.

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5.5 OB Applications of Emotions and Moods

 The Selection Process: One implication from the

evidence on EI is that employers should consider it a
factor in hiring employees, especially for jobs that
demand a high degree of social interaction.
 Decision Making: Positive emotions and moods
seem to help people make sound decisions.
 Creativity: Much research suggests that people in
good moods tend to be more creative than people in
bad moods

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 Motivation: Giving people performance feedback—

whether real or fake—influences their mood, which
then influences their motivation.
 Leadership: Leaders who focus on inspirational goals
generate greater optimism, cooperation, and
enthusiasm in employees, leading to more positive
social interactions with coworkers and customers.
 Negotiation: Angry negotiators who have less
information or less power than their opponents have
significantly worse outcomes.

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 Customer Service: Workers’ emotional states influence

the level of customer service they give, which in turn
influences levels of repeat business & customer
satisfaction.
 Work-Life Satisfaction: Several studies have shown that
people who had a good day at work tend to be in a better
mood at home that evening, and vice versa.
 Deviant Workplace Behaviors: People who feel
negative emotions are more likely than others to engage
in short-term deviant behavior at work, such as gossiping
or excessively surfing the Internet instead of working.

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 Safety and Injury at Work:

 Research relating negative affectivity to increased
injuries at work suggests employers might improve
health and safety (and reduce costs) by ensuring that
workers aren’t engaged in potentially dangerous
activities when they’re in a bad mood.
 Bad moods can contribute to injury at work in several
ways. Individuals in negative moods tend to be more
anxious, which can make them less able to cope
effectively with hazards.

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Implications for Managers

 Recognize that emotions are a natural part of the workplace, and good
management does not mean creating an emotion-free environment.
 To foster effective decision making, creativity, and motivation in
employees, model positive emotions and moods as much as is authentically
possible.
 Provide positive feedback to increase the positivity of employees. Of
course, it also helps to hire people who are predisposed to positive moods.
 In the service sector, encourage positive displays of emotion, which make
customers feel more positive and thus improve customer service
interactions and negotiations.
 Understand the role of emotions and moods to significantly improve your
ability to explain and predict your coworkers’ and others’ behavior.

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Case 5

Emotions are an inevitable part of people’s behavior at work. At the same

time, it’s not entirely clear that we’ve reached a point where people feel
comfortable expressing all emotions at work. The reason might be that
business culture and etiquette remain poorly suited to handling overt
emotional displays. The question is, can organizations become more
intelligent about emotional management? Is it ever appropriate to yell, laugh,
or cry at work?
Some people are skeptical about the virtues of more emotional displays
at the workplace. As the chapter notes, emotions are automatic physiological
responses to the environment, and as such, they can be difficult to control
appropriately. One 22-year-old customer service representative named Laura
who was the subject of a case study noted that fear and anger were routinely
used as methods to control employees, and employees deeply resented this use
of emotions to manipulate them. In another case, the chairman of a major TV
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network made a practice of screaming at employees whenever anything

went wrong, leading to badly hurt feelings and a lack of loyalty to the
organization. Like Laura, workers at this organization were hesitant to
show their true reactions to these emotional outbursts for fear of being
branded as “weak” or “ineffectual.” It might seem like these individuals
worked in heavily emotional workplaces, but in fact, only a narrow
range of emotions was deemed acceptable. Anger appears to be more
acceptable than sadness in many organizations, and anger can have
serious maladaptive consequences.
Others believe organizations that recognize and work with
emotions effectively are more creative, satisfying, and productive. For
example, Laura noted that if she could express her hurt feelings without

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fear, she would be much more satisfied with her work. In other words,
the problem with Laura’s organization is not that emotions are
displayed, but that emotional displays are handled poorly. Others note
that use of emotional knowledge, like being able to read and understand
the reactions of others, is crucial for workers ranging from salespeople
and customer service agents all the way to managers and executives.
One survey even found that 88 percent of workers feel being sensitive
to the emotions of others is an asset. Management consultant Erika
Anderson notes, “Crying at work is transformative and can open the
door to change.” The question then is, can organizations take specific
steps to become better at allowing emotional displays without opening
a Pandora’s Box of outbursts?

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Questions
1. What factors do you think make some organizations ineffective at
managing emotions?
2. Do you think the strategic use and display of emotions serve to protect
employees, or does covering your true emotions at work lead to more
problems than it solves?
3. Have you ever worked where emotions were used as part of a
management style? Describe the advantages and disadvantages of this
approach in your experience.
4. Research shows that acts of co-workers (37%) and management (22%)
cause more negative emotions for employees than do acts of customers
(7 %). What can Laura’s company do to change its emotional climate?

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End of Lecture 3

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