Chapter 5 The underlying structure of emotions during organizational change

Abstract

In order to gain a deeper understanding of how emotional dynamics play out in organizations, a better understanding of the underlying structure of emotions in the workplace is needed. This study set out to investigate the emotional reality of work teams that are confronted with organizational change and to create a feeling scale that can be used to analyze and evaluate the emotional experience of employees involved in and affected by the change. This chapter outlines the results of an iterative statistical analysis to determine the underlying structure of emotions and basic dimensions on which emotions can be categorized. Feeling scales ranging in length from 22 to 42 feeling items were answered by up to 26,900 respondents as part of employee surveys that were used to investigate the subjective perception of organizational change. Factor analysis and self-organizing maps (SOMs) analysis were used in order to cluster and differentiate the underlying basic categories of emotions. The results show that feelings are mainly differentiated as either positive or negative and that those two main factors consist of seven underlying categories, which are summarized as the emotion scales: “Passion,” “Drive,” “Curiosity,” “Defiance,” “Anger,” “Fear and Distress,” and “Damage.” The basic dimensions of the emotions were “hedonic tone” and “affective focus.”

Citation

Kirsch, C., Parry, W. and Peake, C. (2010), "Chapter 5 The underlying structure of emotions during organizational change", Zerbe, W.J., Charmine E. J., H. and Neal M., A. (Ed.) Emotions and Organizational Dynamism (Research on Emotion in Organizations, Vol. 6), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 113-138. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1746-9791(2010)0000006009