Robbinsjudge Ob18 Im 04 Text Updates PR VH
Robbinsjudge Ob18 Im 04 Text Updates PR VH
CHAPTER 4
Emotions and Moods
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
INSTRUCTOR RESOURCES
Instructors may wish to use the following resources when presenting this chapter.
Text Exercises
Myth or Science?: “Smile, and the Work World Smiles with You”
An Ethical Choice: Should Managers Use Emotional Intelligence (EI) Tests?
MyLab Management
o Personal Inventory Assessment: Emotional Intelligence Assessment
o Try It!: Emotions and Mood
o Watch It!: East Haven Fire Department: Emotions and Moods
Career OBjectives: How Do I Turn Down the Volume on My Screaming Boss?
Point/Counterpoint: Sometimes Yelling Is for Everyone’s Good
Questions for Review
Experiential Exercise: Mindfulness at Work
Ethical Dilemma: Data Mining Emotions
Text Cases
Instructor’s Choice
This section presents an exercise that is NOT found in the student's textbook. Instructor's
Choice reinforces the text's emphasis through various activities. Some Instructor's Choice
activities are centered on debates, group exercises, Internet research, and student
experiences. Some can be used in class in their entirety, while others require some
additional work on the student's part. The course instructor may choose to use these at
any time throughout the class—some may be more effective as icebreakers, while some
may be used to pull together various concepts covered in the chapter.
Web Exercises
At the end of each chapter of this Instructor’s Manual, you will find suggested exercises
and ideas for researching OB topics on the Internet. The exercises “Exploring OB Topics
on the Web” are set up so that you can simply photocopy the pages, distribute them to
your class, and make assignments accordingly. You may want to assign the exercises as
an out-of-class activity or as lab activities with your class.
Emotions and moods are similar in that both are affective in nature. But they’re also
different—moods are more general and less contextual than emotions. The time of day
and day of the week, stressful events, social activities, and sleep patterns are some of the
factors that influence emotions and moods.
OB research on emotional labor, affective events theory, emotional intelligence, and
emotion regulation helps us understand how people deal with emotions.
Emotions and moods have proven relevant for virtually every OB topic we study, and
they have implications for managerial practice. Specific implications for managers are
below:
Recognize that emotions are a natural part of the workplace and good
management does not mean creating an emotion-free environment.
To foster effective decision making, creativity, and motivation in employees, look
to model positive emotions and moods as much as is authentically possible.
Provide positive feedback to increase the positivity of employees. Of course, it
also helps to hire people who are predisposed to positive moods.
In the service sector, encourage positive displays of emotion, which make
customers feel more positive and thus, improve customer service interactions and
negotiations.
Understand the role of emotions and moods to significantly improve your ability
to explain and predict your coworkers’ and other’s behavior.
This chapter begins with a vignette discussing the controversy over price hikes in the pharmaceutical
industry. As the outrage over drug profiteering illustrates, emotions can greatly influence our attitudes
toward others, our decision making, and our behaviors. It can even spark conflict with potentially
disastrous consequences. In truth, we cannot set aside our emotions, but we can acknowledge and work
with them. And not all emotions have negative influences on us. Given the obvious role emotions play in
our lives, it might surprise you that, until recently, the field of OB has not given the topic of emotions much
attention. Why? Generally, because emotions in the workplace were historically thought to be detrimental
to performance. Although managers knew emotions were an inseparable part of everyday life, they tried to
create organizations that were emotion-free. Researchers tended to focus on strong negative emotions—
especially anger—that interfered with an employee’s ability to work effectively. Thankfully, this type of
thinking is changing. Certainly some emotions, particularly exhibited at the wrong time, can hinder
performance. Other emotions are neutral, and some are constructive. Employees bring their emotions to
work every day, so no study of OB would be comprehensive without considering their role in workplace
behavior.
D. Weather
1. Weather has little effect on mood.
2. Illusory correlation occurs when people associate two events, but in reality
there is no connection.
E. Stress
1. Stress can be cumulative and does affect mood and emotional states.
F. Social activities
1. Social activities tend to increase positive mood.
2. People who are in positive moods seek out social activities.
G. Sleep
1. A large portion of the U.S. workforce suffers from sleep deprivation.
2. Sleep quality affects mood.
H. Exercise
1. Research consistently shows that exercise enhances peoples’ positive moods.
I. Age
1. Older adults tend to focus on more positive stimuli (and on less negative
stimuli) than younger adults, a finding confirmed across nearly 100 studies.
J. Sex
1. Women show greater emotional expression than men, experience emotions
more intensely, and display more frequent expressions of both positive and
negative emotions.
2. Women also report more comfort in expressing emotions.
3. Women are better at reading nonverbal cues than men are.
III. Emotional Labor
A. Introduction
1. Emotional labor is an employee’s expression of organizationally desired
emotions during interpersonal transactions at work.
B. Felt Versus Displayed Emotions
1. Separate emotions into felt (an individual’s actual emotions) and displayed
(those that the organization requires workers to show and considers
appropriate in a given job).
2. Displayed emotions may require acting to keep employment.
3. Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and forgoing emotional expressions in
response to display rules.
4. Deep acting is the modification of inner feelings.
5. Displaying emotions we don’t really feel is exhausting, so it is important to
give employees who engage in surface displays a chance to relax and
recharge.
6. The disparity between employees having to project one emotion while feeling
another is called emotional dissonance.
IV. Affective Events Theory
A. Understanding emotions at work has been helped by a model called affective
events theory (AET).
1. Employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work and this
influences job performance and satisfaction.
2. Work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions to which
employees’ personalities and moods predispose them to respond with greater
or lesser intensity.
B. In summary, AET offers two important messages:
1. First, emotions provide valuable insights into how workplace hassles and
uplifting events influence employee performance and satisfaction.
2. Second, employees and managers shouldn’t ignore emotions or the events that
cause them, even when they appear minor, because they accumulate.
V. Emotional Intelligence
A. Introduction
1. Emotional intelligence (EI) is a person’s ability to:
a. Perceive emotions in the self and others.
b. Understand the meaning of these emotions.
c. Regulate one’s emotions accordingly in a cascading model, as shown in
Exhibit 4-5.
2. Several studies suggest EI may play an important role in job performance.
3. EI has been a controversial concept in OB, with supporters and detractors.
B. Emotional Regulation
1. Emotion regulation means to identify and modify the emotions you feel.
C. Emotion Regulation Influences and Outcomes
1. As you might suspect, not everyone is equally good at regulating emotions.
2. Individuals who are higher in the personality trait of neuroticism have more
trouble doing so and often find their moods are beyond their ability to control.
3. The workplace environment has an effect on an individual’s tendency to
employ emotion regulation.
4. In general, diversity in work groups increases the likelihood that you will
regulate your emotions.
5. Racial diversity also has an effect: if diversity is low, the minority will engage
in emotion regulation, perhaps to “fit in” with the majority race as much as
possible; if diversity is high and many different races are represented, the
majority race will employ emotion regulation, perhaps to integrate themselves
with the whole group.
a. These findings suggest a beneficial outcome of diversity—it may cause us
to regulate our emotions more consciously and effectively.
6. Changing your emotions takes effort, and this effort can be exhausting.
7. From another perspective, research suggests that avoiding negative emotional
experiences is less likely to lead to positive moods than does seeking out
positive emotional experiences.
D. Emotion Regulation Techniques
1. Researchers of emotion regulation often study the strategies people employ to
change their emotions.
a. Surface acting and deep acting are emotion regulation techniques.
2. One technique of emotion regulation is emotional suppression, or suppressing
initial emotional responses to situations.
B. The time of day and day of the week, stressful events, social activities, and sleep
patterns are some of the factors that influence emotions and moods.
C. OB research on emotional labor, affective events theory, emotional intelligence,
and emotion regulation helps us understand how people deal with emotions.
D. Emotions and moods have proven relevant for virtually every OB topic we study,
and they have implications for managerial practice. Specific implications for
managers are below:
1. Recognize that emotions are a natural part of the workplace and good
management does not mean creating an emotion-free environment.
2. To foster effective decision making, creativity, and motivation in employees,
look to model positive emotions and moods as much as is authentically
possible.
3. Provide positive feedback to increase the positivity of employees. Of course,
it also helps to hire people who are predisposed to positive moods.
4. In the service sector, encourage positive displays of emotion, which make
customers feel more positive and thus, improve customer service interactions
and negotiations.
5. Understand the role of emotions and moods to significantly improve your
ability to explain and predict your coworkers’ and others’ behavior.
7. Sleep
a. A large portion of the U.S. workforce suffers from sleep deprivation.
b. Sleep quality affects mood and decision making.
c. Poor sleep also impairs job satisfaction because people that feel fatigue are
irritable and less alert.
8. Exercise
a. Research consistently shows that exercise enhance peoples’ positive
moods.
9. Age
a. Older adults tend to focus on more positive stimuli (and less on negative
stimuli) than younger adults, a finding confirmed across nearly 100
studies.
10. Sex
a. Women show greater emotional expression than men, experience
emotions more intensely, and display more frequent expressions of both
positive and negative emotions.
b. People also tend to attribute men’s and women’s emotions in ways that
might be based on stereotypes of what typical emotional reactions are.
II. Emotional Labor
A. Introduction
1. Emotional labor is an employee’s expression of organizationally desired
emotions during interpersonal transactions at work.
2. The concept emerged from studies of service jobs.
B. Felt Versus Displayed Emotions
1. Separate emotions into felt (an individual’s actual emotions) and displayed
(those that the organization requires workers to show and considers
appropriate in a given job).
2. Displaying fake emotions requires us to suppress real ones.
a. Surface acting is hiding inner feelings and hiding emotional expressions
in response to display rules.
b. Deep acting is trying to modify our true inner feelings based on display
rules.
3. Displaying emotions we don’t really feel is exhausting, so it is important to
give employees who engage in surface displays a chance to relax and
recharge.
4. The disparity between employees having to project one emotion while
feeling another is called emotional dissonance.
III. Affective Events Theory
A. A model called affective 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.
1. Employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work and this
influences job performance and satisfaction.
2. Work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions.
3. The events-reaction relationship is moderated by the employee’s personality
and mood.
D. Emotions and moods have proven relevant for virtually every OB topic we study,
and they have implications for managerial practice. Specific implications for
managers are below:
1. Recognize that emotions are a natural part of the workplace and good
management does not mean creating an emotion-free environment.
2. To foster effective decision making, creativity, and motivation in employees,
look to model positive emotions and moods as much as is authentically
possible.
3. Provide positive feedback to increase the positivity of employees.
In the service sector, encourage positive displays of emotion, which make
customers feel more positive and thus, improve customer service interactions
and negotiations.
3. In the service sector, encourage positive displays of emotion, which make
customers feel more positive and thus, improve customer service interactions
and negotiations.
4. Understand the role of emotions and moods to significantly improve your
ability to explain and predict your coworkers’ and others’ behavior.
Myth or Science?
“Smile, and the Work World Smiles with You”
It is true that a smile is not always an emotional expression. Smiles are used as social
currency in most organizations to create a positive atmosphere, and a smile usually
creates an unconscious reflexive return smile. However, anyone who has ever smiled at
an angry manager knows this doesn’t always work. In truth, the giving and withholding
of smiles is an unconscious power play of office politics.
Research on the “boss effect” suggests that the amount of power and status a person feels
over another person dictates who will smile. Subordinates generally smile more often
than their bosses smile back at them. This may happen in part because workers are
increasingly expected to show expressions of happiness with their jobs. However, the
perception of power is complex and varies by national culture. In one study, Chinese
workers reflexively smiled only at bosses who had the power to give them negative job
evaluations, while U.S. participants smiled most to managers perceived to have higher
social power. Other researchers found that when individuals felt powerful, they usually
didn’t return even a high-ranking individual’s smile. Conversely, when people felt
powerless, they returned everyone’s smiles.
The science of smiling transcends the expression of emotion. While an angry manager
may not smile back, a happy manager might not as well, according to “boss effect”
Copyright © 2019 Pearson Education, Inc.
Chapter 4 Emotions and Moods Page 124
research. “The relationship of what we show on our face and how we feel is a very loose
one,” acknowledged Arvid Kappas, a professor of emotion research at Jacobs University
Bremen in Germany. This suggests that, when we want to display positive emotions to
others, we should do more than smile, such as when service representatives try to create
happy moods in their customers with excited voice pitch, encouraging gestures, and
energetic body movement.
The science of smiling is an area of current research, but it is clear already that knowing
about the “boss effect” suggests many practical applications. For one, managers and
employees can be made more aware of ingrained tendencies toward others and, through
careful self-observation, change their habits. Comprehensive displays of positive emotion
using voice inflection, gestures, and word choice may also be more helpful in building
good business relationships than the simple smile.
Sources: R. L. Hotz, “Too Important to Smile Back: The ‘Boss Effect,’” The Wall Street Journal, October 16, 2012, D2; P.
Jaskunas, “The Tyranny of the Forced Smile,” The New York Times, February 15, 2015, 14; and
E. Kim and D. J. Yoon, “Why Does Service with a Smile Make Employees Happy? A Social Interaction Model,” Journal
of Applied Psychology 97 (2012): 1059–1067.
Class Exercise
Teaching Notes
Ethical Choice
Should Managers Use Emotional Intelligence (EI) Tests?
Learning Outcomes: Discuss the importance of individual moods and emotions in the workplace
AACSB: Ethical understanding and reasoning; Reflective thinking
As we discussed in this chapter, the concept of emotional intelligence has raised some
debate. One of the topic questions for managers is whether to use EI tests in the selection
process. Here are some ethical considerations:
There is no commonly accepted test. For instance, researchers have recently used the
Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT), the Trait Emotional
Intelligence Questionnaire, and the newly developed Situational Judgment Test of
Emotional Intelligence (SJT of EI) in studies. Researchers feel EI tests may need to
be culturally specific because emotional displays vary by culture; thus, the
interpretation of emotional cues differs. For example, a recent study comparing the
emotional intelligence scores for Indian and North American executives using the
Emotional Competence Inventory test (ECI-2) found the results similar but not the
same, suggesting the need for modification.
Applicants may react negatively to taking an EI test in general, or to parts of it. The
face recognition test, for example, may seem culturally biased to some if the subject
photos are not diverse. Also, participants who score high on EI tests tend to consider
them fair; applicants who score lower may not perceive the tests to be fair and can
thus consider the hiring organizations unfavorably—even if they score well on other
assessments.
EI tests may not be predictive of performance for all types of jobs. In a study of 600
Romanian participants, results showed that EI was valid for salespeople, public
servants, and CEOs of public hospitals, but these were all roles requiring significant
social interaction. EI tests may need to be tailored for each position category or not be
used when the position description does not warrant such tests.
It remains somewhat unclear what EI tests are actually measuring. They may reflect
personality or intelligence, in which case, other measures might be better. Also,
mixed EI tests may predict job performance, but many of these tests include
personality constructs and measures of general mental ability.
There is not enough research on how emotional intelligence affects, for instance,
counterproductive work behaviors. It may not be prudent to test and select applicants
who are rated high on EI when we aren’t yet certain that everything about EI leads to
desired workplace outcomes.
These concerns suggest EI tests should be avoided in hiring decisions. However, because
research has indicated that emotional intelligence does predict job performance to some
degree, managers should not be too hasty to dismiss the tests. Rather, those wishing to
use EI in hiring decisions should be aware of these issues in order to make informed and
ethical decisions about not only whom to hire, but how.
Sources: D. Iliescu, A. Ilie, D. Ispas, and A. Ion, “Emotional Intelligence in Personnel Selection: Applicant Reactions, Criterion, and
Incremental Validity,” International Journal of Selection and Assessment (September 2012), pp. 347–358; R. Sharma, “Measuring
Social and Emotional Intelligence Competencies in the Indian Context,” Cross Cultural Management 19 (2012), pp. 30–47; and S.
Sharma, M. Gangopadhyay, E. Austin, and M. K. Mandal, “Development and Validation of a Situational Judgment Test of Emotional
Intelligence,” International Journal of Selection and Assessment (March 2013), pp. 57–73.
Class Discussion
Ask students whether they have ever taken an EI test. If they have, did they think it
provided an accurate assessment of their EI? Did the results of the test prevent them from
getting a position they wanted? Then, ask students whether they would rely on EI tests
when making hiring decisions.
MyLab Management
Watch It!
Verizon: East Haven Fire Department: Emotions and
Moods
MyLab Management
Personal Inventory Assessments
Emotional Intelligence Assessment
Have you ever been able to “read” others well? Do people say you seem to have “the
right thing to say” for every occasion? Complete this PIA to determine your emotional
intelligence (EI).
MyLab Management
Try It!
Emotions and Moods
Career OBjectives
How do I turn down the volume on my screaming boss?
My boss is a yeller. One time, he kicked my chair and yelled for me to get out of the
office just because I’d forgotten to tell him that lunch had been delivered. His rage makes
me so mad I want to yell back, but I don’t because it isn’t professional. Is there a way to
get him to think before he fumes? —Leslie
Dear Leslie:
We feel for you! Actually, your internal anger response is perfectly normal. Almost
everyone has an emotional reaction to screaming and other situations of workplace
incivility like swearing and rude behavior, and a majority of employees react somehow.
For example, 66 percent of participants in a recent study reported their performance
declined when they were the recipients of incivility, and 25 percent admitted they took
their frustration out on customers. Another study found that verbal aggression reduces
victims’ working memory, making even simple instructions difficult to follow. So you’re
right to want to strategize how to calm the situation since it hurts you, your coworkers,
and the company.
The good news is that you can work on your reactions to de-escalate an episode. Experts
suggest empathizing with your boss (often we find if we try to understand where
someone is coming from, it helps us deal with the emotions more effectively),
apologizing if you’ve done something wrong, and not talking back (incivility is never
cured by payment in kind). Find situations where you can laugh over mutual frustrations
and don’t take his outbursts personally.
The bad news is that you probably can’t change his emotional response to incidents, but
you may be able to help him see the error of his ways by modeling better behavior. Of
course, there are situations in which you cannot and should not tolerate uncivil behavior
(such as when you are being threatened or when the behavior becomes truly abusive). In
those cases, you may need to deal with the situation more directly by first calmly
confronting your boss or, if that fails, seeing someone in human resources. But short of
that breaking point, our experience and the research suggest that your best response is not
to respond outwardly but rather to rethink the way you are responding inwardly.
Point/Counterpoint
Sometimes Yelling is for Everyone’s Good
Point
Anger is discussed throughout this chapter for a reason: It’s an important emotion. There
are benefits to expressing anger. For one, research indicates that only employees who are
committed to their organizations tend to express their anger, and generally only to leaders
who created the situation. This type of expression of anger could lead to positive
organizational change. Second, suppressed anger can lower job satisfaction and lead to a
feeling of hopelessness about things improving.
Even with these findings, we hear a lot about not responding emotionally to work
challenges. Work cultures teach us to avoid showing any anger at all, lest we be seen as
poor workers or, worse, unprofessional, or even deviant or violent. While, of course,
there are times when the expression of anger is harmful or unprofessional, we’ve taken
this view so far that we now teach people to suppress perfectly normal emotions, and to
ignore the effectiveness of some emotional expression.
Emerging research shows that suppressing anger takes a terrible internal toll on
individuals. One Stanford University study found, for example, that when individuals
were asked to wear a poker face during the showing of a movie clip depicting the atomic
bombings of Japan during World War II, they were much more stressed in conversations
after the video. Other research shows that college students who suppress emotions like
anger have more trouble making friends and are more likely to be depressed, and that
employees who suppress anger feel more stressed by work.
For the good of organizations and their employees, we should encourage people not to
hold back their emotions, but to share them constructively.
Counterpoint
Yes, anger is a common emotion. But it’s also a toxic one for the giver and the receiver.
Angry outbursts can compromise the heart and contribute to diabetes, among other ill
effects. The experience of another’s anger and its close correlate, hostility, is also linked
to many counterproductive behaviors in organizations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
estimates that 16 percent of fatal workplace injuries result from workplace violence. That
is why many organizations have developed counteractive techniques—to blunt the
harmful effects of anger in the workplace.
To reduce outcomes, many companies develop policies that govern conduct such as
yelling, shouting profanities, and making hostile gestures. Others institute anger
management programs. For example, one organization conducted mandatory in-house
workshops that showed individuals how to deal with conflicts in the workplace before
they boil over. The director who instituted the training said it “gave people specific tools
for opening a dialogue to work things out.” MTS Systems, a Minnesota engineering firm,
engages an outside consulting company to conduct anger management programs for its
organization. Typically, MTS consultants hold an 8-hour seminar that discusses sources
of anger, conflict resolution techniques, and organizational policies. This is followed by
one-on-one sessions with individual employees that focus on cognitive behavioral
techniques to manage their anger. The outside trainer charges around $10,000 for the
seminar and one-on-one sessions. The financial cost, though, is worth it for the emotional
benefits the participants receive. “You want people to get better at communicating with
each other,” says MTS manager Karen Borre.
In the end, everyone wins when organizations seek to diminish both the experience and
the expression of anger at work. The work environment becomes less threatening and
stressful to employees and customers. Employees are likely to feel safer, and the angry
employee is often helped as well.
Sources: B. Carey, “The Benefits of Blowing Your Top,” The New York Times, July 6, 2010, D1; R. Y. Cheung and I. J. Park,“Anger
Suppression, Interdependent Self-Construal, and Depression among Asian American and European American College Students,”
Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology 16, no. 4 (2010): 517–525; D. Geddes and L. T. Stickney, “The Trouble with
Sanctions: Organizational Responses to Deviant Anger Displays at Work,” Human Relations 64, no. 2 (2011): 201–230; J. Fairley,
“Taking Control of Anger Management,” Workforce Management (October 2010): 10; L. T. Stickney and D. Geddes,“Positive,
Proactive, and Committed: The Surprising Connection between Good Citizens and Expressed (vs. Suppressed) Anger at Work,”
Negotiation and Conflict Management Research 7, no. 4 (November 2014): 243–264; and J. Whalen, “Angry Outbursts Really Do
Hurt Your Health, Doctors Find,” The Wall Street Journal, March 24, 2015, D1, D4.
Class Exercise
1. Divide the class into two groups—one group to take on the issues raised in Point,
the other group to take on the issues raised in Counterpoint. You may want to
divide each half into smaller groups to enable all class members to participate in
the group’s discussions.
2. Ask the class to act as an organization’s management team. Their job is to make
recommendations for a company policy on displays of anger in the work place.
3. Have students present their recommendations to the class and make a decision as
to what the best arguments are and why. What gains do they expect as a result of
the criteria that they used?
4. Have them list the recommendations and benefits on the board for the class to
evaluate during the discussion.
Teaching Notes
4-7. How do you apply concepts about emotions and moods to specific OB issues?
Answer: Emotions and moods have proven relevant for virtually every OB topic
we study, and they have implications for managerial practice. Increasingly,
organizations are selecting employees they believe have high levels of emotional
intelligence. Research has helped to refine theory related to emotional intelligence
in recent years, which should lead to superior tools for assessing ability-based EI.
Emotions and positive moods appear to facilitate effective decision making and
creativity in organizations, making them superior skills for all employees.
Certainly there are practical and ethical limits to controlling employees’ and
colleagues’ emotions and moods. Emotions and moods are a natural part of an
individual’s makeup. Where managers err is in ignoring coworkers’ and
employees’ emotions and assessing others’ behavior as if it were completely
rational. Managers who understand the role of emotions and moods will
significantly improve their ability to explain and predict their coworkers’ and
employees’ behavior.
Learning Objective: Apply concepts about emotions and moods to specific OB issues
Learning Outcome: Discuss the importance of individual moods and emotions in the workplace
AACSB: Reflective thinking
Experiential Exercise
Mindfulness at Work
The concept of mindfulness emphasizes trying to focus your mind in the present moment,
immersing yourself in what’s going on around you. Core principles include suspending
immediate judgment of the environment and your own thoughts, and keeping yourself
open to what is around you. The benefits of mindfulness can reach beyond reducing
stress to include increased creativity, longer spans of attention, reductions in
procrastination, and improved performance.
The Procedure
Start this exercise individually and then come together into groups of three or four
individuals to discuss what you have found. Although full workplace mindfulness
interventions can take several weeks, some basic starting exercises can be done in a
relatively short period and give you a feeling for what a full course of mindfulness would
be like. Here are three simple exercises to try. For all these, everyone needs to put
everything away (especially phones, tablets, and computers!) and focus on what is going
on in the immediate environment.
• Mindful breathing: Clear your head of everything except thoughts of your own breaths.
Concentrate on how you are inhaling and exhaling. It is sometimes helpful to count how
long each breath takes. Try to maintain this mindful breathing for 3 minutes. The group
will then take 3 minutes to discuss how this made them feel.
• Mindful listening: Now clear your head of everything except what is going on in the
immediate environment. Try to hear as many sounds around you as you can, without
judging or evaluating them. Try to maintain this mindful listening for 3 minutes. The
group will then take 3 minutes to discuss some of the details they noticed.
• Mindful thinking: As with listening, clear your head of everything, but now focus just
on your ideas about mindfulness and stress. Do not talk about or write down what you’re
thinking (yet); just focus your whole quiet attention on this exercise and what it means.
Try to maintain this mindful thinking for 3 minutes. The group will then take 3 minutes
to talk about what this experience was like. As noted earlier, these are just brief examples
of what mindfulness exercises are like. In a full mindfulness program, you would go
through several sessions of up to an hour each. Now that you have an idea of what it feels
like to do mindfulness work, consider the following questions in your groups:
4-8. Were there any aspects of the mindfulness practice sessions that you found
especially pleasant or useful? Were there any aspects of the sessions that you
found unpleasant or uncomfortable?
4-9. What concerns might you have about implementing a mindfulness intervention in
the workplace? What are some of the obstacles you might face in trying to have
employees engage in a mindfulness stress reduction program?
4-10. Bring the class together and discuss your responses.
Teaching Notes
Ethical Dilemma
Data Mining Emotions
Did anyone ever tell you that you wear your heart on your sleeve? It’s a popular
expression, but obviously no one is looking at your sleeve to read your emotions. Instead,
we tend to study a person’s facial expressions to “read” their emotions. Most of us think
we’re rather good at reading faces, but we couldn’t say exactly how we make our
interpretations, and we don’t know whether they are accurate. But what if we could use
Thankfully, technology is not quite ready to do this. Face reading is a complex science.
Paul Eckman, a noted psychologist, may be the best human face reader in the world. He
has been studying the interpretation of emotions for over 40 years and developed a
catalog of over 5,000 muscle movements and their emotional content. His work even
spawned a television series called Lie to Me, in which the main characters analyzed
microexpressions —expressions that occur in the fraction of a second—to assist in
corporate and governmental investigations. Using Eckman’s Facial Coding System,
technology firms like Emotient Inc. have been developing algorithms to match
microexpressions to emotions. These organizations are currently looking for patterns of
microexpressions that might predict behavior.
Honda, P&G, Coca-Cola, and Unilever have tried the technology to identify the reactions
to new products, with mixed results. For one thing, since expressions can change
instantly, it is challenging to discern which emotions prevail. A person watching a
commercial, for instance, may smile, furrow his brow, and raise his eyebrows all in the
space of 30 seconds, indicating expressiveness, confusion, and surprise in turn. Second, it
is difficult to know whether a person will act upon these fleeting emotions. Third, the
technology might misinterpret the underlying emotions or their causes.
So far, the most reliable workplace application seems to be using the technology to
capture inconsistencies (lying). Even the pioneer of facial emotion recognition, Ekman,
said, “I can’t control usage [of his technology]. I can only be certain that what I’m
providing is at least an accurate depiction of when someone is concealing emotion.”
Lieberman advises, “Recognize [the technology’s] limitations—it can lead you in the
right direction but is not definitive.”
Sources: Paul Ekman profile, Being Human, http://www.beinghuman.org/mind/paul-ekman, accessed April
17, 2015; E. Dwoskin and E. M. Rusli, “The Technology That Unmasks Your Hidden Emotions,” The Wall
Street Journal, January 29, 2015, B1, B8; and D. Matsumoto and H. S. Hwang, “Reading Facial Expressions
of Emotion,” Psychological Science Agenda, May 2011,
http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2011/05/facial-expressions.aspx.
Questions
4-11. What do you think are the best workplace applications for emotion reading
technology?
Answer: Responses to this question will vary by student. However, at the
moment, the most reliable workplace application is using the technology to
capture inconsistencies.
4-12. What are the ethical implications of reading faces for emotional content in the
workplace?
Answer: Again, responses to this question will vary by student, but most students
will probably focus on the implications of misreading an individual and making
decisions based upon incorrect information.
4-13. Assuming you could become better at detecting the real emotions of others from
facial expressions, do you think it would help your career? Why or why not?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in
MyManagementLab. Student responses will vary.
Case Incident 1
Managers Have Feelings, Too!
Liz Ryan, CEO and founder of Human Workplace, recalls how shocked she was as a
young business person when she found out just how personal the business world is. Your
relationship with your boss or co-workers, to Liz, seemed to be something that could help
your career sail forward and just as easily halt your progression, or even make your life
miserable. Notably, managers have their own likes and dislikes, and experience emotions
in a similar fashion as everyone else. Furthermore, these manager emotions are
contagious and powerful—as a manager, emotion regulation and management may go a
long way in forging a collaborative and non-hostile working environment. Research also
suggests that leader emotions are particularly important in the workplace. For one, some
researchers assert that “what goes around comes around,” meaning that negative
emotional displays from the leader can alter the shared emotions of the group, which in
turn can lead to disapproval of the leader and employee cynicism. On the other hand,
leaders who display empathy tend to be seen as less likely to become ineffective as
leaders, or to “derail.” Overall, displaying either positive or negative emotions (e.g., not
surface acting) can help bolster follower performance, because the followers likely take
in and use this information in making work-related decisions. The reality of manager
emotions can be particularly biting when you are an employee who feels as if your
manager does not like you. Your manager may exhibit emotional displays that suggest he
or she is angry with you, lacks confidence in your skills and abilities, or does not care
about your well-being and advancement in the organization. Although the dislike or
negative emotions toward you may be rooted in various perceptions of you (e.g., your
manager thinks you are incompetent, does not like your style, or does not relate to you),
the negative emotions may also stem from other sources, such as the manager’s
disposition or situational constraints placed on him or her. Notably, Joseph Barber,
associate director at Career Services at the University of Pennsylvania, asserts that it is
critical for employees to realize that their managers see the world differently and may be
experiencing very different emotional states at any given time. This form of perspective
taking, according to Barber, is especially useful as a job applicant trying to anticipate
what managers want in a new employee and highlighting the areas of your relevant
knowledge, skills, and abilities that match these qualifications.
Sources: J. Barber, “The Menagerie of Potential Employers,” Inside Higher Ed, March 20, 2017,
https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2017/03/20/importance-job-search-understandingemotions-employers-essay; L. Davey,
“What to Do When Your Boss Doesn’t Like You,” Harvard Business Review, December 8, 2014, https://hbr.org/2014/12/what-to-do-
when-your-boss-doesntlike-you; W. A. Gentry, M. A. Clark, S. F. Young, K. L. Cullen, and L. Zimmerman, “How Displaying
Empathic Concern May Differentially Predict Career Derailment Potential for Women and Men Leaders in Australia,” The
Leadership Quarterly 26 (2015): 641–53; L. M. Little, J. Gooty, and M. Williams, “The Role of Leader Emotion Management in
Leader-Member Exchange and Follower Outcomes,” The Leadership Quarterly 27 (2016): 85–97; A. McKee, “Empathy Is Key to a
Great Meeting,” Harvard Business Review, March 23, 2015, https://hbr.org/2015/03/empathy-is-key-to-a-greatmeeting; L. Ryan, “Ten
Signs Your Boss Hates You,” Forbes, March 17, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2016/03/17/ten-signs-your-boss-hates-
you/#563e527428cf; and G. Wang and S. E. Seibert, “The Impact of Leader Emotion Display Frequency on Follower Performance:
Leader Surface Acting and Mean Emotion Display as Boundary Conditions,” The Leadership Quarterly 26 (2015): 577–93.
Questions
4-14. How do you think managers can strike a balance between authenticity and
managing their own emotional displays (e.g., surface acting) in organizations? Or
do you think it is impossible to achieve such balance? Why or why not?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in
MyManagementLab. Student responses will vary.
4-15. Do you think there are any emotions that are off limits—that leaders (or
employees) should never display at work? What are they, and what makes them
off limits?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in
MyManagementLab. Student responses will vary.
4-16. Do you think there is a way to improve your reading of your manager’s and
coworkers’ emotions, and adapting your behavior based on this emotional
information? What are some ways that you can work on these types of
behaviors?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in
MyManagementLab. Student responses will vary.
Case Incident 2
When the Going Gets Boring
We’ve all been there—whether your job itself is unfulfilling or if it’s a particularly slow
day at work, boredom strikes the best of us in the workplace. It is not a pleasant feeling.
As Andreas Elpidorou, a researcher at the University of Louisville notes, “Boredom is an
aversive state characterized by dissatisfaction, restlessness, and weariness. . . .
Being in a state of boredom feels like being emotionally trapped.” Boredom can hit
organizations hard. A study by Udemy, an online teaching and learning organization,
found that employees who are bored tend to be twice as likely to leave their organizations
within the next three to six months. Young millennial employees were especially prone to
becoming bored at work and were twice as likely to become bored than their baby
boomer counterparts. In another study by the Intelligence Group, 64 percent of
millennials would prefer to forego a $100,000 salaried position that they think is boring
for a $40,000 position that they love.
Being bored at work can have unacceptable consequences that can cause you a lot of
trouble if you are not careful. For one, you can let your coworkers down when you’re
unresponsive and they need you, especially when they can’t move forward without you.
Second, boredom can at times lead to complaining—although this may seem common in
organizations (due to media portrayals on TV and movies of complaining employees), it
can be irritating to many employees, especially those who are happy with their work.
Third, research shows that boredom can lead to the commission of CWBs, especially
psychologically withdrawing from the job, sabotaging work equipment, and abusing
other coworkers. Fourth, if work is central to an employee’s life and if employees are not
getting their needs met in their personal and work lives, boredom can lead to depression.
Finally, some people just tend to be more bored than others—the boredom-prone
experience a variety of undesirable outcomes, such as receiving less support from their
organizations, underemployment, and lower performance ratings.
So how can you get on track if you’re bored in the workplace? One of the keys to
tackling boredom is to take control and be proactive. Research on over 1,500 employees
in Finland (tracked over three years) suggests that taking control of your job and setting
challenges for yourself, along with acquiring the resources you need to do the job well,
reduce boredom gradually over time. Part of this involves forcing yourself to be more
curious and looking outside your own responsibilities. When we become overwhelmed
by the monotony of familiar work, it is time to find new insights, perspectives, and ways
of approaching our tasks. Others suggest that offering learning opportunities and reducing
consistent hours worked, especially for millennials, may be effective in reducing
boredom at work. Notably, the Udemy survey found that 80 percent of employees would
become more interested in their tasks if they were given the opportunity to learn more
skills. These results echo calls for the gamification of the workplace in which everyday
tasks can be altered to include game mechanics, potentially leading to a reduction in
boredom and an increase in cognitive control.
Sources: K. Bruursema, S. R. Kessler, and P. E. Spector, “Bored Employees Misbehaving: The Relationship between Boredom and
Counterproductive Work Behaviour,” Work & Stress 25, no. 2 (2011): 93–107; A. Gaskell, “How Gamification Can Drive Workplace
Performance,” Forbes, February 21, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/adigaskell/2017/02/21/how-gamification-can-
driveworkplace-performance/#4493eae7f8e3; L. K. Harju, J. J. Hakanen, and W. B. Schaufeli, “Can Job Crafting Reduce Job
Boredom and Increase Work Engagement? A Three-Year Cross-Lagged Panel Study,” Journal of Vocational Behavior 95–96 (2016):
11–20; S. Harrison, “6 Ways the Most Successful People Conquer Boredom at Work,” Fast Company, November 13, 2015,
https://www.fastcompany.com/3053229/6-ways-the-most-successful-people-conquer-boredom-at-work; J. Lumsden, E. A.
Edwards, N. S. Lawrence, D. Coyle, and M. R. Munafó, “Gamification of Cognitive Assessment and Cognitive Training: A
Systematic Review of Applications and Efficacy,” JMIR Serious Games 4, no. 2 (2016): e11; R. Moy, “3 Inexcusable Mistakes
You’re Probably Making If You’re Bored at Work,” Forbes, October 27, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/dailymuse/2016/10/27/3-
inexcusable-mistakes-youre-probably-making-if-youre-bored-at-work/#154d5d044216; M. L. M. van Hooff and E. A. J. van Hoof,
“Boredom at Work: Proximal and Distal Consequences of Affective Work-Related Boredom,” Journal of Occupational Health
Psychology 19, no. 3 (2014): 348–359; M. L. M. van Hooff and E. A. J. van Hoof, “Work-Related Boredom and Depressed Mood
from a Daily Perspective: The Moderating Roles of Work Centrality and Need Satisfaction,” Work & Stress 30, no. 3 (2016): 209–
227; J. D. Watt and M. B. Hargis, “Boredom Proneness: Its Relationship with Subjective Underemployment, Perceived Organizational
Support, and Job Performance,” Journal of Business and Psychology 25, no. 1 (2010): 163–174; E. Wiechers, “2016 Udemy
Workplace Boredom Study,” Udemy Blog, October 26, 2016, https://about.udemy.com/udemy-for-business/workplaceboredom-
study/; and K. Zimmerman, “What to Do with a Millenial Employee That’s Bored at Work,” Forbes, November 13, 2016,
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kaytiezimmerman/2016/11/13/
what-to-do-with-a-millennial-employee-that-is-bored-at-work/#3a1649a33014.
Questions
4-17. Who is responsible for reducing boredom in the workplace and why? Is it the
employer? The one who is bored?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in
MyManagementLab. Student responses will vary.
4-18. Do you think certain tasks are inherently boring and thus cannot be changed? If
yes, what are they? If there are tasks that cannot be made more interesting, how
can the negative effects of boredom be mitigated for the employees who must
perform those tasks?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in
MyManagementLab. Student responses will vary.
4-19. Which emotion regulation technique do you think would be the most successful
in mitigating boredom and why?
Answer: This item can be assigned as a Discussion Question in
MyManagementLab. Student responses will vary.
MyLab Management
Go to www.pearson.com/mylab/managementfor Auto-graded writing questions as well
as the following Assisted-graded writing questions:
4-20. Refer again to the Ethical Dilemma. In what scenarios would you agree to having
your emotions read and interpreted by your organization?
4-21. Refer again to Case Incident 1, Have you ever had to adapt to a supervisor’s (or
superior’s) emotional state? If so, what was the outcome of your adaptation?
MyManagement Lab only – comprehensive writing assignment for this chapter.
Instructor’s Choice
Promoting Organizational Citizenship Behavior
2. What is EQ? Visit the Internet’s leading site on EQ: http://www.eq.org. There you
will find a wide variety of resources to assist you in researching this interesting
topic.
3. Bring five new facts you learned from at least two of the above websites to class
for a group discussion.