Organizational

Behaviour

Module No. 004

Emotions and Moods

By
Muhammad Shahid Iqbal
 What are Emotions and Moods
 Affect is a generic term that covers a broad range of feelings
people experience, including both emotions and moods.
 Emotions are intense feelings directed at someone or something.
 Moods are less intense feelings than emotions and often arise
without a specific event acting as a stimulus. Most experts
believe emotions are more fleeting than moods.
 Emotions are reactions to a person or an event . You show your
emotions when you’re “happy about something, angry at
someone, afraid of something.”
 Moods, in contrast, aren’t usually directed at a person or an
event. But emotions can turn into moods when you lose focus on
the event or object that started the feeling. Good or bad moods
can make you more emotional in response to an event.
 What are Emotions and Moods
 You show your emotions when you’re “happy about something,
or “angry at someone, afraid of something.”
 Moods, in contrast, aren’t usually directed at a person or an
event. But emotions can turn into moods when you lose focus
on the event or object that started the feeling.
 Affect is a broad term that encompasses emotions and
moods. There are differences b/w emotions and moods.
 Emotions are more likely to be caused by a specific event
and emotions are more fleeting than moods. emotions can
be more clearly revealed by facial expressions.
 Emotions may be more action-oriented, they may lead us
to some immediate action, while moods may be more
cognitive, they may cause us to think for a while.
 What are Emotions and Moods
 Affect, Emotions, and Moods
 What are Emotions and Moods
 There are dozens of emotions, including anger, contempt,
enthusiasm, envy, fear, frustration, disappointment,
embarrassment, disgust, happiness, hate, hope, jealousy, joy,
love, pride, surprise, and sadness.
 Basic emotions can be studied by facial expressions. But
emotions are too complex to be easily represented on our faces.
Many think of love as the most universal of all emotions.
Cultures also have norms that govern emotional expression, so
the way we experience an emotion isn’t always the same as the
way we show it.
 René Descartes, identified six “simple and primitive passions”
wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness. “all the others are
composed of some of these six or are species of them.”
 What are Emotions and Moods
 There are six essentially universal emotions
1. Anger
2. Fear
3. Sadness
4. Happiness
5. Disgust
6. Surprise
 The Basic Moods:
 Positive emotions: such as joy and gratitude, express a favorable
evaluation or feeling.
 Negative emotions; such as anger or guilt, express the opposite.
When we group emotions into positive and negative categories,
they become mood states because we are now looking at them
more generally instead of isolating one particular emotion
 What are Emotions and Moods
Positive affect as a mood dimension consisting of positive emotions.
Negative affect is a mood dimension of negative emotions.
 Moral Emotions
 Moral emotions: emotions that have moral implications because
of our instant judgment of the situation that evokes them.
 Our responses to moral emotions differ from our responses to
other emotions.
 Moral emotions are developed during childhood. Because
morality is a construct that differs between cultures, so do moral
emotions.
 Do emotions make us ethical? Research on moral emotions
questions the previous belief that emotional decision making is
based on higher-level cognitive processes.
 Our beliefs are shaped by our groups, resulting in unconscious
responses and a shared moral emotion.
 This may allow us to justify purely emotional reactions as
rationally ethical just because we share them with others.
 Sources of Emotions and Moods
 Emotions and moods can be caused by many reasons.
 Personality: Moods and emotions have a trait component: As
all individuals, we must have built-in tendencies to experience
certain moods and emotions more frequently than others do. We
also differ in how intensely we experience the same emotion,
while those who are affectively intense, experience good and
bad moods and emotions more deeply.
 Day of the week or time of the day: people tend to be in their
worst moods early in the week and in their best moods late in
the week. Monday morning is therefore not the best time to
reveal bad news or ask someone for a favour.
 Weather: illusory correlation. It is the tendency of people to
associate two events when in reality there is no connection.
Many people think so, but weather has little influence on mood.
 Sources of Emotions and Moods
 Stress: Stress can affect our moods and emotions negatively.
The effects build over time and constant levels of stress can
worsen our moods and emotions. Even low levels of constant
stress can worsen moods.
 Social activities: social activities increase positive mood and
have little effect on negative mood. Positive mood seeks out
social interactions. Physical, informal and epicurean activities
are more strongly related to positive moods than formal and
sedentary events.
 Sleep: Indeed, sleep quality does affect mood. If you are tired,
you are more likely to feel fatigue, anger and hostility, and
therefore, it can impair decision-making and make it difficult to
control emotions. poor sleep also impairs job satisfaction
because people feel fatigued, irritable, and less alert.
 Sources of Emotions and Moods
 Exercise: exercise enhances our positive mood. This is
especially good for depressed people.
 Age: Negative emotions seem to occur less, as people get older.
Highly positive moods last longer for older individuals while
bad moods fade more quickly than for younger people.
Emotional experience improves with age.
 Sex: Women tend to be more emotionally expressive, feel
emotions more intensely, have longer-lasting moods, and
express emotions more frequently than men.
 Emotional Labor
 Emotional labor: an employee’s expression of organizationally
desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work. More
specifically, workers are expected to regulate their emotions
during interactions with customers, co-workers and superiors
 Ex: Airlines expect their flight attendants to be cheerful; Funeral
directors are expected to be sad and doctors emotionally neutral.
 Emotional labor is relevant to almost every job. managers expect
you to be courteous, not hostile, in your interactions with others.
 The true challenge arises when employees have to project one
emotion while feeling another. This disparity is emotional
dissonance. Inconsistencies between the emotions people feel and
the emotions they project.
 Long-term emotional dissonance is a predictor for job burnout,
declines in job performance, and lower job satisfaction.
 Emotional Labor
 Emotional labor creates dilemmas for employees. (To people you
don’t like, backbiter, you’re forced to feign friendliness)
 Types of Emotions: Felt emotions and Displayed emotions
 Felt Emotion: the emotions that you actually feel.
 Displayed Emotion: emotions that organization requires workers to
show and considers appropriate in a given job. They’re not innate;
they’re learned. Displaying fake emotions requires us to suppress
real ones.
 Surface acting: hiding feelings and foregoing 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: trying to modify true inner feelings based on display
rules. A health care provider trying to genuinely feel more empathy
for her patients is deep acting.
 Affective Events Theory
 Effective Events Theory (AET): demonstrates that employees
react emotionally to things that happen to them at work, and
this reaction influences their job performance and satisfaction.
emotions are a response to an event in the work environment
 Affective Events Theory
 The theory begins by recognizing that emotions are a response to
an event in the work environment. This environment creates work
events that can be hassles, uplifting events, or both.
 hassles are colleagues who refuse to carry their share of work,
conflicting directions from managers, and time pressures.
 Uplifting events include meeting a goal, getting support from a
colleague, and receiving recognition for an accomplishment.
 These work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions,
to which employees’ personalities and moods predispose them to
respond with greater or lesser intensity.
 Finally, emotions influence a number of performance and
satisfaction variables, such as organizational citizenship behavior,
organizational commitment, level of effort, intention to quit, and
workplace deviance.
 Emotional Intelligence
 Emotional intelligence: A person’s ability to:
 Perceive emotions in the self and others.
 Understand the meaning of these emotions.
 Regulate one’s emotions accordingly in a cascading model.
A Cascading Model of Emotional Intelligence
 Emotional Intelligence
 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.
 Emotion Regulation: involves identifying and modifying the
emotions you feel.
 Strategies to change your emotions include thinking about more
pleasant things, suppressing negative thoughts, distracting
yourself, reappraising the situation, or engaging in relaxation
techniques.
OB Applications of Emotions & Moods
 In this section, we assess how an understanding of emotions and
moods can improve our ability to explain and predict the
selection process in organizations, decision making, creativity,
motivation, leadership, interpersonal conflict, negotiation,
customer service, job attitudes, and deviant workplace behaviors.
 Selection: emotions effect employee effectiveness, so EI should
be a hiring factor, especially for social jobs. People with
emotions sold more than their counterparts with less emotional
intelligence.
 Decision Making: Emotions are an important part of decision
making process in organizations. Positive emotions can lead to
better decisions. Positive emotions enhance problem-solving
skills, make quick decisions, so positive people find better
solutions to problems.
OB Applications of Emotions & Moods
 Creativity: People in good moods tend to be more creative and
produce more ideas and more options,. Positive mood increases
flexibility, openness, and creativity
 Motivation: promoting positive moods may give a more
motivated workforce. People with high motivation are
emotionally committed to their work. Involvement with the job
generate positive emotions. Discouragement leads to lower
motivation leads negative emotions. Positive mood affects
expectations of success. Feedback amplifies this effect.
 Leadership: Emotions are important to acceptance of messages
from organizational leaders. When leaders feel excited,
enthusiastic, and active, they may be more likely to energize their
subordinates and convey a sense of efficacy, competence,
optimism, and enjoyment.
 OB Applications of Emotions & Moods
 Negotiation: Negotiation is an emotional process. Emotions may
impair negotiators performance. It is found that a negotiator who
feigns anger has an advantage over the opponent. Why? Because
when a negotiator shows anger, the opponent concludes the
negotiator has conceded all she can and so gives in, but feeling bad
about your performance appears to impair future negotiations. poor
negotiators experience negative emotions, develop negative
perceptions of their counterpart, and share information.
 Customer Service: worker’s emotional state influences customer
service, which influences levels of repeat business and of customer
satisfaction. Providing high-quality customer service makes
demands on employees b/c it often puts them in a state of
emotional dissonance. Over time, this state can lead to job burnout,
declines in job performance, and lower job satisfaction.
OB Applications of Emotions & Moods
 Employees’ emotions can transfer to the customer. a matching
effect between employee and customer emotions called
emotional contagion, the “catching” of emotions from others.
 Work-Life Satisfaction: Ever hear the advice “Never take your
work home with you,” That’s easier said than done. It is found,
people who had a good day at work tend to be in a better mood at
home that evening, and vice versa. People who have a stressful
day at work also have trouble relaxing after they get off work.
 Safety and Injury at Work: Don’t do dangerous work when in a
bad mood. Individuals in negative moods tend to be more anxious,
which can make them less able to cope effectively with hazards. A
person who is always scared will be more pessimistic about the
effectiveness of safety precautions because she feels she’ll just get
hurt or she might panic when confronted with a threatening
situation.
OB Applications of Emotions & Moods
 Deviant Workplace Behaviors: behavior that violate
established norms and threaten the organization, its members, or
both. For instance, envy is an emotion that occurs when you
resent someone for having something you don’t have but
strongly desire—such as a better work assignment, larger office,
or higher salary. It can lead to malicious deviant behaviors. An
envious employee could backstab another employee, negatively
distort others’ successes, and positively distort his own
accomplishments. Evidence suggests people who feel negative
emotions, particularly anger or hostility, are more likely than
others to engage in deviant behavior at work.