Description
Symposium: Emotions at workChairs: Inge van Seggelen – Damen (inge.vanseggelen@ou.nl); Karen van Dam (karen.vandam@ou.nl)
Discussant: Prof. dr. James J. Gross, Stanford University (gross@stanford.edu)
State of the art
While emotions are prevalent in daily life, emotions at work have received only limited research attention. Yet, emotions are directly linked to motivation and behavior, and thus are very likely to serve both as outcomes and as triggers of organizational events and processes. Initially, job satisfaction was the most ‘affective’ variable in organizational research, together with emotional intelligence, emotional stability, and positive and negative affectivity as predictors of work performance. This situation changed with the introduction of Weiss and Cropanzano’s (1996) Affective Events Theory, which places great emphasis on the causal role of affective experiences and responses, and their relevance for employees’ attitudes, and performance. Around the same time, emotional labor, and thus emotional expression, became a topic of research (Grandey, 2000). Moreover, stress researchers investigated employees’ responses to stress, including employees’ problem focused and emotion focused coping behavior. With the introduction of positive psychology, positive emotional states, such as happiness and resiliency became the focus of attention. The introduction of Gross’ (1998, 2015) process model of emotion regulation was recognized as an important contribution to studying emotion regulation in organizations.
This raises the question: where are we now?
New perspective/ Contributions
Our symposium brings together a number of recent approaches to emotions at work. While the studies are rooted in validated theoretical models, they also extent these lines and provide new insights by unraveling emotional processes in organizations. They show that emotions at work can have different roles; for instance, they can serve as trigger of buffer and as an outcome. Moreover, the studies provide new insights into emotion regulation, the possible adverse effects of certain emotion regulation strategies at work, and the ways in which emotion regulation can be improved.
Research/Practical Implications
By focusing on emotions and emotion regulation at the workplace, we intend to demonstrate and discuss the everyday presence and usefulness of employees’ affective experiences at work. The findings of these studies have both theoretical and practical implications that can contribute to a more effective and adaptive approach towards emotions in organizations, and will be discussed in the symposium.
Individual contributions
By means of this 90 minutes symposium we intend to bring together a selection of international researchers to present and discuss workplace emotions research.
| Period | 16 Oct 2019 → 18 Oct 2019 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Tilburg, Netherlands |
| Degree of Recognition | International |