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Organizational behavior scholars have long recognized the importance of a variety of emotion-related phenomena in everyday work life. Indeed, after three decades, the span of research on emotions in the workplace encompasses a wide variety of affective variables such as emotional climate, emotional labor, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, empathy, and more recently, specific emotions. Emotions operate in complex ways across multiple levels of analysis (i.e., within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group, and organizational) to exert influence on work behavior and outcomes, but their linkages to human resource management (HRM) policies and practices have not always been explicit or well understood. This chapter offers a review and integration of the bourgeoning research on discrete positive and negative emotions, offering insights about why these emotions are relevant to HRM policies and practices. We review some of the dominant theories that have emerged out of functionalist perspectives on emotions, connecting these to a strategic HRM framework. We then define and describe four discrete positive and negative emotions (fear, pride, guilt, and interest) highlighting how they relate to five HRM practices: (1) selection, (2) training/learning, (3) performance management, (4) incentives/rewards, and (5) employee voice. Following this, we discuss the emotion perception and regulation implications of these and other discrete emotions for leaders and HRM managers. We conclude with some challenges associated with understanding discrete emotions in organizations as well as some opportunities and future directions for improving our appreciation and understanding of the role of discrete emotional experiences in HRM.

Purpose – We aim to elucidate the influence of leaders' emotion expressions on the social distance between leaders and followers in face-to-face and digital communication.

Design/methodology/approach – Literature review

Findings – Following functional theories on emotions, leaders' expressions of socially engaging emotions (e.g., guilt, happiness, gratitude, and compassion) lower social distance. Leaders' expressions of socially disengaging emotions (e.g., anger, contempt, disgust, and pride) increase social distance. In digital communication, we propose that the effect of socially engaging and disengaging emotions depends on the social presence that is provided by the different digital communication media.

Practical implication – Based on our theoretical model, we derive implications for (1) leaders' use of face-to-face communication, (2) the importance of digital communication with high social presence, (3) leaders' use of digital communication as a tool for emotion regulation, and (4) coping strategies when communicating via digital means with low social presence.

This chapter looks into unpleasant affective states, or rather “dreaded emotions,” in leadership. Specifically, the adaptive roles and functions of fear, anger, and sadness are reviewed and discussed in a leadership context.

The social functions of fear, anger, and sadness are first presented. Following each emotion, the target of emotional expression – both other-directed (i.e., targeting followers and/or emotion-eliciting events) and self-directed (i.e., targeting leader) – is further discussed.

A symmetrical assumption has emerged over recent years that positive emotions result in positive outcomes and negative emotions lead to negative outcomes. In practice, the realities of organizational life and leader–follower interactions do not reflect such a neat juxtaposition. Positively valenced emotions can yield negative outcomes, and negatively valenced emotions can bring about positive outcomes.

Unpleasant emotions – fear and sadness, in particular – remain understudied in organizational and leadership literature, even though leaders experience these emotions just like the rest of us. This review offers ideas, through the combination of psychological and leadership research, on how social functions of dreaded emotions, including fear, anger, and sadness, can yield desirable leadership outcomes.

This chapter provides a review on unpleasant emotions (i.e., fear, anger, and sadness) that are rarely discussed and underresearched in leadership literature.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the differences in consumers’ willingness to pay for different types of design attributes due to different levels of specific anticipatory emotions evoked by them. The research aims to show how firms can benefit by leveraging the findings that different types of design attributes – that is, functionality, aesthetics, and environmental sustainability – affect profit margin per unit differently. Further, the chapter claims that design is a core competency that can pay dividends in terms of profit margins for firms. It is important for firms to develop expertise in understanding and leveraging relationships between the types of design attributes, specific emotions, and consumers’ willingness to pay.

The chapter uses the product categories of cell phones and laptop computers in the three experiments to test the hypothesized relationships between design attributes (functionality, aesthetics, and environmental sustainability), specific emotions, and willingness to pay.

The research finds that different attributes of design – functionality, aesthetics, and sustainability – evoke different types of emotions and different levels of willingness to pay.

The data were primarily collected via experiments in a behavioral laboratory.

Firms can leverage different attributes of design to position and price products according to emotional requirements of the target customer segment to match their willingness to pay and maximize profit margin per unit.

The research specifically measures willingness to pay in joint presentation – independent evaluation scenarios to assess differences in how functionality, aesthetics, and sustainability impact willingness to pay.

Purpose – In recent decades, some sociologists have turned to evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to support, modify, and reconfigure existing social psychological theory. In this chapter, we build on this momentum by considering the relevance of current work in affective and cognitive neuroscience for understanding emotions and the self. Our principal aim is to enlarge the range of phenomena currently considered by sociologists who study emotion while showing how affective dynamics play an important role across most outcomes and processes of interest to social scientists.

Approach – We focus on the ways external social objects become essential to, and emotionally significant for, the self. To that end, we draw on ideas from phenomenology, pragmatism, classic symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. We show how basic affective systems graft on, build from, and extend current social psychological usages of emotions as well as the important sociological work being done on self, from both symbolic interactionist (SI) and identity theory (IT) perspectives. Finally, we turn to the promising directions in studying emotional biographies and various aspects related to embodiment.

Findings – Affective systems consist of brain networks whose connections deepen when activated, with interesting variations observable at the neural, individual, and social levels in which one or more system is more salient than others. Affective systems may come to saturate the construction and maintenance of an autobiography or collective biography, with consequences for self-projection, self-other attunement, and embodied action. In turning to embodiment, however, we consider aspects of cognitive neuroscience that can contribute to ongoing work in neurosociology building on symbolic interactionism.

Practical Implications – The focus on affective systems suggests new research agendas in leveraging emerging neurosociological methods in the laboratory, while pushing for novel, naturalistic observational strategies. The latter, in particular, may be key to deepening sociology's contributions to neuroscience, better positioned to bring the full disciplinary toolkit to bear on these questions.

Social Implications – In considering the embodied and projective aspects of the self, we show how work examining convergence and divergence between embodied and linguistic pathways opens up new insights into how the self develops or acquires behavioral repertoires. As such, this chapter points to the need for holistic approach to understanding the social actor and, thereby, how political, economic, historical, and cultural factors shape self as much as biogenetic and psychological.

Originality of the Chapter – Sociologists think of emotions as either dependent or intervening variables: (1) signaling identity or situational incongruence, (2) states to be managed, and (3) structural dimensions of superordinate–subordinate relationships. Our integration of the theory of affective systems emphasizes the causal primacy emotions have over other behavioral and cognitive functions, clarifying how they play into the construction and maintenance of self and social experience.

To reconcile theoretical discrepancies between discrete emotion, dimensional emotion (positive vs. negative affect), and the circumplex model, we propose the bifurcation model of affect structure (BMAS). Based on complexity theory, this model explores how emotion as an adaptive complex system reacts to affective events through negative and positive feedback loops, resulting in self-organizing oscillation and transformations between three states: equilibrium emotion, discrete positive and negative emotion in the near-equilibrium state, and chaotic emotion. We argue that the BMAS is superior to the extant models in revealing the dynamic connections between emotions and the intensity of affective events in organizational settings.

Adopting the theoretical framework of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT; Ellis, 1962, 1994), we examine the cognitive antecedents of functional behavior and adaptive emotions as indicators of emotional intelligence (EI) and test central assumptions of REBT. In an extension of REBT, we posit that adaptive emotions resulting from rational cognitions reflect more EI than maladaptive emotions, which result from irrational cognitions, because the former lead to functional behavior. The results of the first study using organizational scenarios in an experimental design confirm central assumptions of REBT and support our hypotheses. In a second correlational study we replicate the connection between rational cognitions and EI by measuring real person data using psychometric scales. Both studies indicate that irrational attitudes result in reduced job satisfaction.