Organizational Behavior
Chapter 4
Workplace emotions, attitudes, and stress
Emotions influence almost everything we do in the workplace.
Often occur before cognitive processes and, consequently influence them.
Emotions: physiological, behavioral, and psychological episodes experienced toward an object, person, or event that create a state of readiness.
Quite short.
Directed toward someone or something.
Emotions are experiences, they represent changes in our physiological state, psychological state and behavior.
Most of these emotional reactions are subtle, they occur without our awareness.
Moods are not directed towards anything in particular and tend to be long-term emotional states.
Types of emotions
All emotions have two common features.
- An associated valance (core affect) signaling that the perceived object or event should be approached or avoided.
- The level of activation
Emotions, attitudes, and behavior
Attitudes are judgments, whereas emotions are experiences.
We experience emotions very briefly, whereas our attitude towards something or someone is more stable over time.
Beliefs
These are your established perceptions about the attitude object, what you believe to be true.
Each of these beliefs also has a valence, you have a positive or negative feeling about each belief.
Feelings
Represent your conscious positive or negative evaluations of the attitude object.
Most of the time, your beliefs about something or someone affect your feelings, but the reverse sometimes occurs. Your feelings about something can cause you to change your feelings about specific beliefs regarding that target.
Behavioral intentions
Your motivation to engage in a particular behavior regarding the attitude object.
Attitude-behavior contingencies
- People with the same beliefs might form quite different feelings toward the attitude object because they have different valences for those beliefs.
- People with the same feelings toward the attitude object often develop different behavioral intentions because of their unique experiences, personal values, self-concept, and other individual differences.
How emotions influence attitudes and behavior
Our brain tags incoming sensory information with emotional markers based on a quick and imprecise evaluation of whether that information supports or threatens our innate drives.
They are automatic and non-conscious.
The experienced emotions influence our feelings about the attitude object.
Generating positive emotions at work
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance: an emotional experience caused by a perception that our beliefs, feelings, and behavior are incongruent with one
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