Functionality, Intentionality and Morality: Volume 3

Charmine E. J. Härtel is Professor of Organizational Behavior and Director of Research for the Department of Management at Monash University. Her current research activities focus on emotions and patterns of relating at work; development of emotional intelligence, diversity, leadership, and team effectiveness. Charmine has been recognized for her excellence in research, innovation in organizational practice, supervision, service and mentoring, in particular with relation to students from diverse backgrounds, and is the recipient of several awards including the Martin E.P. Seligman Applied Research Award, the Janet Chusmir Service Award, the Monash University Vice Chancellors Award for Postgraduate Supervision Excellence and the Deakin University Student Association Award for Supervisor of the Year in the Faculty of Business and Law. She has authored five books and over 50 refereed journal articles, which have appeared in journals such as the Journal of Management, Academy of Management Review, Applied Psychology: An International Review, Leadership Quarterly, and Journal of Applied Psychology and is on the editorial board of Human Relations.

As in the previous volumes of Research on Emotions in Organizations, the chapters in this book are drawn largely from the best contributions to the bi-annual International Conference on Emotions and Organizational Life. The editors of this series are the co-founders and co-organizers of this event which has come to be known as the “Emonet” conference. Eight of the chapters in this volume were selected from those papers accepted, using a double-blind peer-review process, for inclusion in the fifth Emonet conference held in Atlanta in August 2006. The conference attracted 51 submissions from which a total of 39 paper, symposium, and poster presentations were selected for inclusion on the program. Conference program submission included as chapters in this volume were selected based on their quality and interest, as well as the contribution that they make to the theme of this volume: functionality, intentionality and morality of emotions. The volume is completed by four additional invited chapters.

Historically, research in organizational behavior has denied and even denounced the presence and impact of emotions in the workplace. Today, after little more than 10 years of research on emotions in the workplace, organizational behavior scholars look to emotions as an important determinant of nearly every facet of workplace behavior. From interpersonal behavior, to team performance, and strategic decision-making in top management teams, researchers have argued that the role of emotions is fundamental to our understanding of these organizational processes. Research on emotions in the workplace has had a fast and furious growth, facilitated by a lack of critical reflection upon the limits of bounded emotionality as a framework for understanding individuals’ actions in organizations. It is undeniable that emotions influence some facets of organizational behavior. But the questions of interest in this chapter are, in which areas of organizational behavior do emotions play a critical role in the determination of individual and organizational outcomes and under what conditions?

Affective phenomena have become increasingly visible in the organizational behavior literature. Definitions and differentiation between affect, mood, and emotion are provided, based on psychological research in the affective sciences. Yet, both theoretically and empirically, these three constructs are still treated interchangeably. Given the operationalization confusion, there may be more findings on discrete emotions than actually reported. The body of knowledge on discrete emotions, namely their specific functions, could be better integrated and would enrich organizational research. Consequently, the challenge of achieving clarity in defining and operationalizing affect, mood and emotion is discussed.

The relevance of affective factors in the charismatic leadership process has been widely acknowledged in leadership research. Building on this notion, the present study empirically investigated the role of leaders’ positive mood and emotional intelligence in the development of charismatic leadership behaviors. We developed hypotheses linking these constructs and tested them in a sample of 34 leaders and their 165 direct followers from a multinational corporation. Results showed that both leaders’ positive mood and leaders’ emotional intelligence were positively related to their charismatic leadership behaviors, as rated by followers. Further, we found leaders’ emotional intelligence to moderate the relationship between leaders’ positive mood and their charismatic leadership behaviors. Emotionally intelligent leaders exhibited charismatic leadership behaviors to a high extent, largely irrespective of their degree of positive mood. In contrast, leaders low on emotional intelligence were more likely to exhibit charismatic behaviors when their positive mood was high, while they were less likely to exhibit such behaviors when their positive mood was low. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for leadership theory, research, and practice.

Teams’ emotional skills can be more than the sum of their individual parts. Although theory emphasizes emotion as an interpersonal adaptation, emotion recognition skill has long been conceptualized as an individual-level intelligence. We introduce the construct of team emotion recognition accuracy (TERA) – the ability of members to recognize teammates’ emotions – and present preliminary evidence for its predictive validity. In a field study of public service interns working full-time in randomly assigned teams, taken together positive and negative TERA measured at the time of team formation accounted for 28.1% of the variance in team performance ratings nearly a year later.

In a world where companies create multiple brand and product features and use technology to continuously improve the appeal and delivery of their offering, a perception that high tech characteristics are sufficient to attract customers and build loyalty for the company is a common misconception. In reality, the emotional aspects of the customer–brand/product bond are critical and must be factored into strategic decisions. Holbrook and Batra (1987a) suggest that consumers seek emotional value and benefit from brand/product and that these emotional ties may exceed the value derived from technology. While research turns attention to investigate emotions within this brand/product relationship, questions arise regarding possible levers that can be engaged to trigger this emotional relationship. In an effort to understand this complex issue, a review of literature on emotions and strategy, framed, as value management will be discussed and the role that emotions play in the customer–brand/product bond will be addressed. In addition, this discussion moves to understand which design element can possibly meet this challenge. Is it possible that color and its established link to emotions could prove strong enough to be a strategic lever?

Service recovery strategies have been identified as a critical factor in the success of service organizations. This study develops a conceptual framework to investigate how specific service recovery strategies influence the emotional, cognitive and negative behavioral responses of consumers, as well as how emotion and cognition influence negative behavior. Understanding the impact of specific service recovery strategies will allow service providers to more deliberately and intentionally engage in strategies that result in positive organizational outcomes. This study was conducted using a 2×2 between-subjects quasi-experimental design. The results suggest that service recovery has a significant impact on emotion, cognition and negative behavior. Similarly, satisfaction, negative emotion and positive emotion all influence negative behavior but distributive justice has no effect.

In the early 1980s, the term “new leadership” was used to describe and categorize a number of new approaches to define leadership; one of the most important being transformational leadership. Transformational leadership is presented in the literature as different from transactional leadership. Whereas transactional leadership is defined as an exchange of rewards for compliance, transformational leadership is defined as transforming the values and priorities of followers and motivating them to perform beyond their expectations (Yukl, 1998). Transformational leadership enables followers to transcend their own self-interests for a collective higher purpose, mission, or vision and to exceed performance expectations. Transformational leaders communicate a compelling vision of the future, provide symbols, and make emotional appeals to increase awareness of mutual goals, encourage followers to question traditional ways of doing things; and treat followers differently but equitably on a one-to-one basis (Avolio et al., 1999). Previous research has shown that these transformational behaviors are related to leadership effectiveness (Lowe, Kroeck, & Sivasubramaniam, 1996).

This paper offers a cross-cultural examination of emotion management in two service organizations: a Japanese specialty shop and a chain of grocery stores in the US. Building on an overview of service culture in the US and its domestication in Japan, we provide an analysis of the two organizational case studies, focusing on their common initiation of a “behavior campaign,” its normative character, perceptions, and repercussions. The paper concludes by focusing on the comparative aspect of the analysis, locating the organizational management of emotions in the context of national culture, and focusing on the organizational use of broader emotional blueprints of socialization related to collectivism and individualism, such as “shame” (in Japanese culture) and “guilt” (in North American culture).

Nursing comprises interactions with patients which may require emotional labor. This study clarifies the relation of emotional labor with the three burnout dimensions within the context of the Demand Control Support model in nurses. We used the Dutch Questionnaire on Emotional Labor (D-QEL) to measure surface acting, deep acting, suppression, and emotional consonance. In line with other studies, job characteristics were significantly related to emotional exhaustion and surface acting was significantly related to emotional exhaustion and depersonalization. Emotional consonance, the situation where somebody effortlessly feels the emotion that is required, is related to personal accomplishment.

Over the years, research has shown that, although there are various factors which contribute to failed change, one of the key reasons people resist change is due to the inability of leaders to convince employees to support change and to commit the energy and effort necessary to implement it. Senior management can ensure an organization is change-ready by developing and maintaining a supportive culture and climate that positively influence the emotional health and welfare of employees. Despite the obvious importance of leadership to change efforts, little previous research has investigated, holistically and in the context of major change, the relationship between senior management actions and employee responses. Furthermore, the change literature largely ignores the role that emotions play in employee responses to change initiatives. This chapter addresses both areas, and develops a model of organizational change from a justice and emotions perspective, which depicts employees’ justice perceptions related to senior executives as affecting trust directly and indirectly, through associated emotional responses.

The present article sets out to explore the ethical aspect of emotional competence used as both a personal and a collective resource in the occupational context of caring work. The data discussed in this article consists of interviews of and writings by Finnish social workers and nurses. By combining the concepts ‘emotional capital’ and ‘ethics of care’, this article concludes that the emotional competence of care workers manifests itself as the capability to use one's emotions in a way that enhances the ethical values of caring work and provides the employees with a sense of professional competence.

Just as a rotten apple makes other apples around it begin to decay, so too can people influence others within their vicinity, particularly in terms of destructive emotions and behaviors. Trevino and Youngblood (1990) adopted the term ‘bad apples’ to describe individuals who engage in unethical behaviors and who also influence others to behave in a similar manner. In this chapter, the ‘bad apple’ metaphor is adopted to describe the employee whose actions and interactions create and maintain destructive faultlines and unethical exclusion behaviors that negatively impact the emotional well-being and effective and ethical performance of the team. In particular, the chapter examines the way in which ‘bad apples’ use destructive emotion management skills through the manipulation of emotional levers of others, what motivates them to do so and the implications it may have on management.

Nalini Ambady is a Professor at Tufts University's Psychology Department, and conducts research on interpersonal judgment.