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