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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.

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.

Purpose – This chapter presents a social emotions-based analysis of justice dynamics, emphasizing the important influence of social emotions (e.g., envy, empathy, schadenfreude, and vicarious joy) on justice judgments and reactions. The chapter also identifies a dimension for organizing social emotions, based on the degree of congruence they reflect between self and other. Congruent social emotions align the individual experiencing the emotion with the individual who is the target of their emotion, thus leading individuals to reason about and perceive justice in ways that are aligned with the target. Conversely, incongruent social emotions create misalignment and lead to justice perceptions that are misaligned and oppositional with regard to the target.

Methodology/approach – The chapter is informed by research suggesting that justice judgments are subjective. We consider the perspective of each of the key parties to justice (i.e., decision makers, justice recipients, and third parties) to evaluate the effect of (in)congruent social emotions on justice.

Findings – The core argument advanced in the chapter is that the (in)congruence of parties’ social emotions shape whether people evaluate the outcomes, procedures, and treatment encountered by a target as being fair. Fairness judgments, in turn, shape parties’ actions and reactions.

Originality/value – The chapter is the first to offer a framework integrating research on organizational justice with research on social emotions, arguing that social emotions strike at the very foundation of justice dynamics in groups and teams. In addition, the congruence dimension described in the chapter offers a novel and potentially important way of thinking about social emotions.

Purpose – Past research on emotions in negotiation has focused primarily on the impact of the emotional state of one negotiator in a negotiation. We focus instead on the group emotional tone of the negotiation, defined as the joint emotional experience of all negotiators in the negotiation. Past research also has focused only on one dimension of emotions in negotiation: valence. We focus instead on two additional dimensions of emotions: uncertainty and action tendencies. Examining emotions at the group level, and taking a multidimensional perspective on emotions in negotiation, provides a more nuanced examination of the effects of emotions in negotiation, and also highlights the possibility of emotional ambivalence (and its effects) both within and across negotiators within a negotiation.

Approach – We examine emotions at the group level, and take a multidimensional approach to understanding the impact of group-level emotions within the context of a negotiation.

Findings – We propose that groups characterized by certain versus uncertain emotional tone will have different perceptions of risk in the environment, which can prompt different behavioral outcomes that affect group negotiation processes and outcomes. Furthermore, we propose that groups characterized by different action tendencies will display differences in willingness to engage others during negotiation, which can significantly influence group negotiation processes and outcomes. Evaluating these additional dimensions should provide a more comprehensive perspective on the effects of group-level emotions on negotiation processes and outcomes.

Value – This review is intended to illuminate the powerful role that negotiation-level emotional tone might play in group negotiation behaviors and outcomes. Part of the importance of understanding the impact of group emotional tone is for group leaders to anticipate – and possibly proactively manage – its impact. This can provide managers a reference point to better understand – and effectively manage – negotiations among group members.

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.

Why do emotions matter? Across the centuries the same answer has been returned; they are the salt of life without which it would lack savour. Thus, St Augustine asked rhetorically if we would not consider a general apatheia to be the worst of human and moral defects. Today, Elster repeats this refrain: “simply, emotions matter because if we did not have them nothing else would matter. Creatures without emotion would have no reason for living nor, for that matter, for committing suicide. Emotions are the stuff of life” (Elster, 1999, p. 403). However, it is a different question to ask about their purpose in relation to other things and other doings, but a necessary one because salt has to flavour something else. The answer developed here is that emotions are commentaries on our concerns. Emotions are about something and those somethings are the things we care about most or cannot but care about to some extent. As commentaries, emotions tell us how much we care and how we are doing in relation to concerns which are not reducible to our feelings about them.

Most interpersonal or group communication via the Internet involves people who are not co-present and are not interacting at the same time. Typically, messages contain only text and graphics. This means that people cannot use tone of voice or nonverbal signals to judge the accuracy of messages or, in some cases, even to know the other's true identity. These features of computer-mediated interaction may have dramatic effects on the ways people communicate and how they make judgments about whether the messages of other group members are truthful or deceptive. However, little research has examined truth telling and lying in computer-mediated interaction or in groups larger than two. This chapter investigates how computer-mediated communication affects the composition, transmission, and detection of truthful and deceptive messages.