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Collectivist organizations like worker cooperatives are known for requiring high levels of participation, striving toward community, and making space for affective relationships among their members. The emotional intensity of such organizations has long been considered both an asset and a burden: while personal relationships may generate solidarity and sustain commitment, interpersonal interactions can be emotionally intense and, if left unmanaged, can even lead to organizational demise. How do collectivist-democratic organizations manage emotions to create and sustain member commitment? This study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a worker-run, worker-recuperated business in Argentina to analyze the emotional dynamics of a democratic workplace. First, the author shows how members of the cooperative engage in emotional labor not only in their customer service, but also through their participation in lateral management and democratic governance. An analysis of individual feeling management, however, provides only a partial picture of emotional dynamics. Drawing on the theory of interaction ritual chains, the author argues that workplace practices like meetings and events can produce collective emotions that are critical to maintaining members’ commitment to the group. Finally, the author shows how interaction ritual chains operate in the BAUEN Cooperative, tracing how symbols of shared affiliation circulate through interactions and are reactivated through the confrontation of a common threat. The author concludes by reflecting on implications for future research on emotions in collectivist organizations and participatory workplaces more broadly.

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.

This chapter addresses the issue of how special collective ritual events operate and influence actors’ emotional states and commitment to a group. It is argued that in such events (e.g., rallies, holiday celebrations, and religious ceremonies) the greater the emotional intensity experienced by persons, the greater will be their commitment to and solidarity within the group. A model is proposed, which identifies several factors involved in such a process. The model builds on a body of theory and research, “structural ritualization theory (SRT),” which focuses on the role symbolic rituals play in social interaction and the generation and transformation of social structure. Four factors play a crucial role in the model: focus of attention, interactional pace, interdependence, and resources. Several of these factors also involve subcomponents that are identified and discussed. Attention is directed to how the formulation presented here is influenced by, and differs in certain ways from, classic and contemporary analysts including those working in the areas of social psychology and the sociology of emotions. Various examples are provided to illustrate the ability of the model to understand collective ritual events. Directions for further theory development and possible research investigating the arguments of the theory are also discussed.

This study examines how perceptions of injustice, anger, and group identification motivate follower intentions to engage in collective action against leaders. The study revolved around the Malaysian prime minister’s actions and responses toward allegations of misuse of public funds. Responses from 112 Malaysians via a cross-sectional survey revealed that follower perceptions of leader injustice are significantly related to anger toward the leader, which in turn is related to intentions to engage in collective action. The relationship between perceptions of distributive injustice and anger is moderated by group identification, while group efficacy moderates the relationship between anger and collective action intentions.

The quality of strategic decisions made at the helm of corporations matters a great deal. Predominantly, research on strategic decision-making has focused on CEOs as if they decide alone. Yet in reality, even the most powerful CEO makes strategic decisions together with an executive board. This chapter offers a theoretical explanation of strategic board decision-making through the emotional contagion between the CEO and board members.

We used both previous research and qualitative material – two case studies and interviews with several dozen CEOs of large corporations as well as the board members of one of them – to build our theoretical model.

Our inBoard Emotional Contagion Model (inBECM) specifies the following individual–collective emotional dynamics: After a strategic affective event has triggered an affective discussion within the boardroom, the emotionally intelligent CEO communicates verbally in order to – through an emotional contagion – homogenize board members’ emotional states leading to shared sense-making of the event and – potentially – to improved decision-making.

Suggestions are made for the inBECM contribution to emotion theory. Implications are stated for the key role of emotion in improving board decision-making and strategizing.

Since 2008, Greece has been spiralling down an economic and socio-political crisis. Over the past decade, it has endured massive riots, consecutive elections, a debilitating public debt, and endless rescue plans by the EU and other international bodies. The crisis sparked an intense interest in the Greek public discourse, which is often accused of being dominated by populist rhetoric. This interest appears to be accompanied predominantly by a certain leitmotif: instead of appreciating the assistance offered, the Greek people resent it and taking refuge in populist rhetoric, further undermining the country’s stability. This echoes the age-old argument that ‘the people are an irrational mob acting impulsively, a lamentable state that should be cured or disciplined.’ Could the shaming, the appeal to sober morality – branding all other discourses as populist and dangerous – be the fashionable response of a cosmopolitan elite, high-profile pundits and institutions to the problems of global capitalism? The debate raged in the public sphere and in the streets of Athens. On multiple occasions, the crisis was used as a trope in the European public sphere to justify socio-political changes, austerity measures and disciplinary actions. The emerging schema juxtaposed populist/anti-populist discourses, reducing discourses and identities to black and white. This chapter reads discursive constructions of the Greek crisis, by-stepping the populist/anti-populist divide. Using analysis based on affect theory and the philosophy of emotions, it investigates the various uses of resentment as part of affective engineering and as an instrument of collective identification, in an environment of multiple overlapping crises in Europe.

Research consistently finds that procedural justice affects emotional reactions to inequity. This research, however, has failed to examine the ways in which contextual factors may alter the impact of fair procedures on emotions. Here, I argue that collective legitimacy is one such contextual factor, and I develop hypotheses related to this argument. I also suggest that procedural justice researchers should examine discrete emotions, because the combined effects of legitimacy and procedural justice vary depending upon the emotion in question. In highlighting the interplay between legitimacy and procedural justice, this paper also underscores the necessity of studying procedural justice within the context of the group.

The thinking of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza is gradually entering the field of social science. In this paper, we are particularly interested in applying his theory of affects to the analysis of passionate collective behaviours at work in the field of financial markets. The general hypothesis that underpins our work is the idea that, in a context of radical uncertainty about the future, the succession of common affect regimes translates into passionate sequences that determine investor behaviour and produce market dynamics. Using an analysis of the stock market cycles of Taffler, Bellotti, and Agarwal (2018), Taffler, Agarwal, and Wang (2019), we show that the Spinozist concept of common affects can help us to understand the mechanisms in the production of collective emotion and to account for the speculative dynamics at the origin of the great financial bubbles.

This paper challenges the dominantly pessimistic view of emotion held by many strategy scholars and elaborates on the various ways in which emotion can help organizations achieve renewal and growth. I discuss how appropriate emotion management can increase the ability of organizations to realize continuous or radical change to exploit the shifting conditions of their environments. This ability is rooted in developing emotion-based dynamic capabilities that facilitate organizational innovation and change. These emotion-based dynamic capabilities express or arouse distinct emotional states such as authenticity, sympathy, hope, fun, and attachment to achieve specific organizational goals important to strategic renewal, such as receptivity to change, the sharing of knowledge, collective action, creativity, and retention of key personnel.