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This chapter adopts a functional perspective of affect to organize, discuss, and synthesize the chapters of this volume. According to functional accounts of affect, emotions and moods help groups to solve their most important problems – problems such as maintaining cohesion, allocating roles and responsibilities among group members, facilitating clear intragroup communication, motivating selflessness, and coordinating collective action. The chapters of this volume are diverse in focus, yet they all extend our understanding of how and when affective phenomena help groups to solve these problems, and when they fail to do so. At the same time, they point to new and exciting directions for future research on the functions and dysfunctions of affect in groups.

In the current chapter, we examine people's perceptions of their place in hierarchies. We explore the complexity of these self-perceptions and show how they are susceptible to inaccuracy and bias. We examine how such inaccuracies, however, can lead to negative social consequences: Overestimating one's place can lead to collective punishment by other group members, and underestimating one's place can lead to underutilizing levers of influence, and ultimately, to losing one's social standing.

In this chapter, we present a model for the process of value creation in power-differentiated groups and identify affect as a key moderator. We divide the value creation process into two key steps: information sharing and information processing. Further, we propose that high- and low-power group members each play a critical, albeit different, role in these processes. High-power group members are instrumental in establishing an environment that encourages all group members to share their unique information. Once that information is available, low-power group members use it to formulate solutions that create value. Further, we propose that the affective experience of each of these determines the extent to which they fulfill their role. If high-power group members are happy, they are more likely to create an open and sharing environment. If angry, they will likely squelch broad participation in information sharing. While low-power group members are naturally prone to effortful cognition, we propose that the more suspicious they are regarding the motives of those around them, the more carefully they will process available information.

Past research exploring the influence of affect on group outcomes has primarily considered how the experience of single emotions and mood vary and converge across group members, but does not address the fact that a single group member may express multiple, conflicting emotions simultaneously (e.g., emotional ambivalence). Such complex expressions may drastically alter the way other group members perceive and respond to one another, and in turn, drastically alter the group-level dynamics. We address this gap in the literature by modeling the social consequences of expressing emotional ambivalence, thereby expanding our understanding of emotional ambivalence in group contexts. Implications for research on emotional ambivalence and research on emotions in groups are discussed.

We report on research that investigated the emotional mediation of leader behavior on observers’ affinity for the members of a leader's group. Participants (N=181) read a vignette describing the positive, negative, or neutral behaviors of a national leader, and the approval or disapproval of that leader's followers for that behavior. Results revealed that liking (i.e., allophilia) for the leader's followers decreased when the group leader behaved negatively and group members expressed approval for their leader. These changes in allophilia were mediated by the amount of anger experienced by the participant. Implications of these findings for future work on leadership and intergroup relations are discussed.

Building upon the psychological literature on responses to potentially traumatic events (e.g., Bonanno, 2004; Tugade & Fredrickson, 2004), this chapter explores the potential impact of managers’ affective expressions during tumultuous times at work. We propose that managerial displays of positive emotions that are also socially appropriate and authentically experienced will enhance employee and team change-related outcomes. We also explain why emotional suppression on the part of managers may be detrimental to healthy employee responses to change. Finally, we discuss theoretical and practical implications of this model.

I argue that while research on collective emotions is gaining in popularity, there has not been sufficient attention paid to understanding the mechanisms that explain how and why group emotions influence group outcomes. The goal of this chapter is to fill this gap by introducing group-member interactions as a group-level mechanism. I explore how positive and negative collective emotions in workgroups link to different types of member interactions, which in turn, influence group outcomes. Finally, I discuss the theoretical contributions of the research and the implications for future research on workgroup emotions and member interactions.

In this chapter we apply intergroup emotion theory (IET; Mackie, Devos, & Smith, 2000) to reflect on the conditions under which individuals may experience intergroup emotions in workgroups, and to explore some possible consequences of those emotions. First, we briefly outline IET and describe the psychological mechanisms underlying intergroup emotion with a particular emphasis on the role of social identification. Second, we describe some of the antecedents of shared and varied social identifications in workgroups, which may in turn elicit shared or varied intergroup emotions in workgroups. Finally, we consider potential consequences for both relationship and task outcomes such as organizational citizenship behavior, workgroup cohesion, relationship and task conflict, issue interpretation, and information sharing.

This chapter examines how emotional intelligence may influence the performance of groups. I first address relevant issues concerning emotional intelligence at the individual level of analysis. I then describe the range of composition models by which group emotional intelligence constructs can be created, from the emotional intelligence of the members of the group, articulate mechanisms by which each construct may be related to performance, and use Steiner's (1972) typology of group tasks to identify when each construct may best predict performance. I also use the mechanisms of multiplication and compensation to consider how group emotional intelligence may combine with other group constructs to predict performance. I end this chapter with a discussion of research implications.