EMOTION IN ORGANIZATIONS: A NEGLECTED TOPIC IN I/O PSYCHOLOGY, BUT WITH A BRIGHT FUTURE

Neal M. Ashkanasy UQ Business School, University of Queensland, Brisbane and

Claire E. Ashton-James School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney

Inthis chapter we present a review of some of the mainthreads of research on the role played by emotion and affect in organizations. In this respect, we refute the notion that organizations are totally rational, where the role of emotion is something that can be discounted or ‘managed’ out of existence. Our arguments reflect Mumby and Putnam’s (1992) notion that organizations are arenas of ‘bounded emotionality’. Perhaps the reason that scholars have been so reluctant to address the role of emotion in organizations is because of the inherent complexity and ambiguity surrounding emotion. Simon (1976), for example, wrestled with notions of ‘irrationality’ and ‘arationality’, without ever really admitting that emotion is a concept that canbe studied by serious scholars. Inthis chapter, by contrast, we address this complexity head-onby elucidating the multiple levels at which emotion affects functioning in organizations.

Since publication in this book series of the ground-breaking article by Pekrun and Frese (1992), the topic of emotion and affect in organizational settings has steadily gained credence, to the point that it is now attracting considerable attention in the mainstream management and I/O psychology literature. This is evidenced in recent special issues of journals (e.g., Ashkanasy, 2004; Fisher & Ashkanasy, 2000; Fox, 2002; Humphrey, 2002; Weiss, 2001, 2002a) and edited books (e.g., Ashkanasy, Ha¨rtel, & Zerbe, 2000; Fineman, 1993, 2000; Ha¨rtel, Zerbe, & Ashkanasy, 2004; Lord,

International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2005 Volume 20. Edited by Gerard P. Hodgkinson and J. Kevin Ford

222 I NTERNATIONAL R EVIEW OF I NDUSTRIAL AND O RGANIZATIONAL P SYCHOLOGY 2005 Klimoski, & Kanfer, 2002; Payne & Cooper, 2001). Indeed, Barsade, Brief,

and Spataro (2003) have gone so far as to declare that an ‘affective revolution’ has transformed the study of organizational behavior.

Intheir 1992 review of research onemotioninthe workplace, Pekrunand Frese noted that, at the time, there was ‘little research that speaks of the issue of work and emotion’ (p. 153). In this respect, their work was ground- breaking, although much of the analysis they presented in their review was derived from existing literature on job satisfaction and motivation that was never intended to address emotion explicitly. In this respect, Pekrun and Frese did an excellent job of identifying the underlying role of emotion in motivation and satisfaction at work. Indeed, the model of task-related and social emotions that they identified has proved remarkably robust in the light of the more recent research in this field.

Although Pekrun and Frese (1992) presented a cogent case for affect and emotion to be considered more systematically in organizational research, there was little immediate response to their call. We suspect that this may

be because they failed to question the underlying reasons for this lack of interest in the study of emotion. This issue was not tackled until Ashforth and Humphrey published their ‘reappraisal’ of the role of emotion in organizations in 1995. Ashforth and Humphrey provided a deeper analysis of the reasons that the study of affect and emotion had failed to attain legitimacy to date in the mainstream literature. The underlying reason they identified was based on ‘norms of rationality’ (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995, p. 101) that seem to have permeated post-WWII organizational science. Moreover, Ashforth and Humphrey identified an expansive agenda of research that has served as a blueprint for the future development of research in this field, encompassing the experience and expression of emotion, emotional change at the individual and organizational levels of analysis, and the nexus between the ‘content and context of work and the emergence of emotions’ (p. 118). Ashforth has recently acknowledged that these ‘norms of rationality’ still remain in place today, commenting that ‘(the) dearth of theorizing on emotions in organizations is partially attributable to the potent behavioral and cognitive paradigms that held sway in social psycho- logical and organizational studies for much of the 20th Century’ (Ashforth, 2000, p. xii).

But Pekrun and Frese (1992) were not entirely correct in their summation that there had been almost no interest in studying emotions in organizations prior to the 1990s. While Ashforth and Humphrey (1995) and Weiss and Brief (2001) have both described the rationalist model as a relatively recent phenomenon, they note that studies on affect and emotion in the workplace date back to the 1930s. For example, Weiss and Brief (2001) describe work by Fisher and Hanna, who posited that employee maladjustment at work was largely explicable in terms of ‘nonadjustive emotional tendencies’ (quoted in Weiss & Brief, 2001, p. 137), and Hersey (1932), who built upon Fisher and

223 Hanna’s work, and concluded that emotion and emotional perceptions were

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central determining factors underlying behavior and attitudes at work. Weiss and Brief went on to describe the development of emotion and affect research that followed these early studies, but made it clear that this early interest in emotion was subsumed under the broader frameworks of stress and job satisfaction.

Mastenbroek (2000) argued further that recorded interest in emotion at work dates back to the early Renaissance. Using evocative imagery, he cited examples from philosophical literature, beginning with the work of Bernard du Rosier (1404–1475). Especially poignant in Mastenbroeck’s chapter was his depictionof 18th century industrialist Josiah Wedgwood’s attempts to instil self-control among his employees. In this portrayal, Mastenbroek illustrated how emotional control was, even in the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, a central plank of management. As Ashforth and Humphrey (1995) note, however, this interest had taken a backstage role in the development of management scholarship in the 20th century.

Not surprisingly, much of the thrust of the renewed interest in studying emotions came from critical–interpretivist theorists. Prominent authors in this genre included Mumby & Putnam (1992), who coined the term ‘bounded emotionality’ as a foil to Simon’s (1976) idea of bounded rationality, which is rooted within the cognitive perspective. Also, in the early 1990s Hosking and Fineman (1990) noted that emotions were critical to understanding of organizational behavior, and subsequently edited a remarkable collection of interpretive studies that vividly illustrated this point (Fineman, 1993). Moreover, van Maanen and Kunda (1989) described a penetrative qualita- tive analysis of how emotion and emotional expression are intrinsic to organizational culture.

The van Maanen and Kunda (1989) article marked a period of further realization that emotion plays a critical role through the control of emotional expression. In this respect, organizational sociologist Arie Hochschild authored The Managed Heart, published in1983, which triggered interest in the power of emotional control in organizations. Hochschild coined the term ‘emotional labor’ to describe employees’ partial remuneration for expressing emotions that are not necessarily felt, where it is deemed situa- tionally appropriate. This was further developed by Rafaeli and Sutton (1987, 1989), who began to translate this phenomenon into research based ontheory-drivenmodel-testing (see also Sutton& Rafaeli, 1988).

By the early 1990s, therefore, after a gap of nearly 50 years, researchers working in the more positivist framework had also begun to take the study of emotions in work settings more seriously. In addition to Pekrun and Frese (1992), contributions around this time by Albrow (1992), Baron (1993), George (1990), Isen and Baron (1991), and Wharton and Erickson (1995) were beginning to attract notice. In particular, researchers began to focus on

224 I NTERNATIONAL R EVIEW OF I NDUSTRIAL AND O RGANIZATIONAL P SYCHOLOGY 2005 the impact of mood in work settings. Applying the work of experimental

social psychologists such as Forgas (1992) to the workplace, George and Brief (1992, 1996a, b) and others (e.g., Mittal & Ross, 1998) have examined the effect of positive and negative mood on a variety of individual and group work behaviors that affect workplace functioning and organizational outcomes. This work illustrates how important it is to understand the role of emotioninthe workplace.

One of the most significant recent breakthroughs in the field of emotion in organizations, however, came in 1996 with the publication by Weiss and Cropanzano of Affective Events Theory (AET). This theory represented anexplicit re-emergence of affect from the job satisfactionliterature that had subsumed it followin g the early in terest inemotioninorgan ization . This work followed the lead of Organ and Near (1985) and Brief and Roberson(1989), who were the first to state that job satisfactionis different from affect. Specifically, Brief and Robertson observed that job satisfaction actually constitutes a constellation of attitudes towards work that includes both cognitive and affective elements.

The core ideas of AET are that (1) anemployee’s work behavior is determined to a large extent by the way s/he feels at the time, (2) the workplace environment is a source of discrete ‘affective events’ that generate these feelings, and (3) the employee’s emotional responses to these events determine subsequent attitudes and behaviors. Behavior in AET can be emotion-driven, including negative behavior such as anger or violence, or positive behavior such as spontaneous helping behavior or expressions of pleasure with work. Just as importantly, behavior can be determined by attitudes that represent a more developed outcome of mood (see Forgas & George, 2001), including a decision to work productively (see Wright, Bonnet, & Sweeney, 1993; Wright & Cropanzano, 1998) or to engage in antisocial or prosocial activities (Organ, 1990).

Affective events theory thus highlights the importance of recognizing emotionality inthe workplace, both interms of the impact of object and events on employees’ emotional states, and the impact of employees’ emotions on workplace attitudes and behaviors. As such, AET represents an appropriate foundation for the analyses that follow in this chapter. To open our case, we review empirical research supporting the central principle of AET, that organizations are home to discrete ‘affective events’ that con- tribute to fluctuations in employee’s mood and emotional states from moment to moment. After establishing the conditions under which affective states arise in the workplace, we consider the implications of emotions and moods in organizations at multiple levels of analysis. Updating Ashkanasy’s (2003a, b) multilevel model of emotions in organizations, we then review the way in which affective states ultimately influence organizational outcomes by means of their impact within individuals, between individuals, on dyadic relations, on group-level dynamics, and finally on organizational culture.

225 In the third section of this chapter, we examine the strategic implications of

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emotions in the workplace. We conclude with a prospective analysis of research on emotions in organizations.

EMOTION IN ORGANIZATIONS: A NEGLECTED TOPIC IN I/O PSYCHOLOGY, BUT WITH A BRIGHT FUTURE