7 Emotion in Organizations

Abstract

Emotion has become one of the most popular—and popularized—areas within organizational scholarship. This chapter attempts to review and bring together within a single framework the wide and often disjointed literature on emotion in organizations. The integrated framework includes processes detailed by previous theorists who have defined emotion as a sequence that unfolds chronologically. The emotion process begins with a focal individual who is exposed to an eliciting stimulus, registers the stimulus for its meaning, and experiences a feeling state and physiological changes, with downstream consequences for attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions, as well as facial expressions and other emotionally expressive cues. These downstream consequences can result in externally visible behaviors and cues that become, in turn, eliciting stimuli for interaction partners. For each stage of the emotion process, there are distinct emotion regulation processes that incorporate individual differences and group norms and that can become automatic with practice. Although research often examines these stages in relative isolation from each other, I argue that each matters largely due to its interconnectedness with the other stages. Incorporating intraindividual, individual, interpersonal, and organizational levels of analysis, this framework can be a starting point to situate, theorize, and test explicit mechanisms for the influence of emotion on organizational life.

We keep coming back to feelings, I'll have time for feelings after I'm dead. Right now we're busy. (NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, speaking about the historic Independence Day 2006 launch of the space shuttle Discovery, after discussing the horror and sadness at losing the Columbia space shuttle in 2003, the worry leading up to the launch of Discovery, and the relief and pleasure at watching Discovery succeed; Boyce, 2006)

Acknowledgments

Correspondence should be addressed to Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, or via the Internet to [email protected]. Preparation of this chapter was supported by National Institute of Mental Health Behavioral Science Track Award for Rapid Transition 1R03MH071294–1. I am deeply indebted to Aiwa Shirako for comments, research assistance, and her contribution to an earlier version of the process framework. For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank Sigal Barsade, Art Brief, Stephane Côté, Kevin Fox, Gavin Kilduff, and Jim Walsh.

Notes

1. I thank Stéphane Côté for this suggestion.