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This chapter overviews organizational neuroscience (ON), covering the past, present, and future of this growing field of inquiry. First, we define ON and clarify the boundaries of the field. Second, we describe the evolution of ON by starting with early papers that tended to discuss the potential of ON to benefit both research and practice. Throughout its development, debates have abounded about the value of ON. Such debates are often related to challenges in collecting, integrating, interpreting, and using information from the brain-level of analysis. It is time for the field to move beyond these debates to focus on applying neuroscience to further theory development and reveal more comprehensive answers to research questions of importance to both academics and practitioners. Third, we propose and describe future research directions for ON. The research directions that we propose are merely a sample of the many paths along which ON inquiry can move forward. Fourth, we outline potential practical implications of ON, including: training and development, job design, high-performance assessment, motivating communications, and conflict prevention. Finally, we draw conclusions about ON as it stands today, address challenges in developing ON, and point out opportunities. We conclude with takeaways and highlight the importance of ON for both academics and practitioners.

This chapter advocates the use of neuroscience theoretical insights and methodological tools to advance existing organizational justice theory, research, and practice. To illustrate the value of neuroscience, two general topics are reviewed. In regard to individual justice, neuroscience makes it clear that organizational justice theory and research needs to integrate both emotion and cognition. Neuroscience also suggests promising avenues for practical individual justice interventions. For other-focused justice, neuroscience clarifies how empathy provides a mechanism for deontic justice while again highlighting the need to consider both emotion and cognition. Neuroscience research into group characterizations also suggests promising explanations for deontic justice failures. We also show how other-focused justice interventions are possible, but more complex, than for self-focused justice. We conclude that interdisciplinary research has great potential to advance both organizational justice and neuroscience research.

The application of physiological methods to the study of psychological phenomena has garnered considerable interest in recent years. These methods have proved especially useful to the study of emotions, since evidence suggests that validly measuring a person’s emotional state using traditional, psychometric methods such as surveys or observation is considerably more difficult than once thought. The present chapter reviews the challenges associated with measuring emotions from a purely psychological perspective, and suggests that the study of emotions in organizations can benefit from the use of physiological measurement to complement traditional assessment methods. We review more established approaches to physiological measurement, including those related to hormone secretion, cardiovascular activity, and skin conductance. We then highlight somewhat more recent attempts to use neurological scanning. A theme of this chapter is that both psychological and physiological measures are relevant to understanding and assessing emotions in organizations. Accordingly, we propose a multi-method approach involving both types of assessment. Finally, we discuss the practical and ethical implications of employing various forms of physiological measurement in the study of emotions, specifically in the context of organizations.

Previous research on emotional labor has typically been conducted at the individual level of analysis, despite the fact that many organizations have incorporated work teams into their business model. The use of work teams turns emotional management into a group task on which employees work as a collective. The present chapter proposes a conceptual model that describes the antecedents and consequences of team-level emotional labor. We propose that work groups often impose positive display rules (express integrative emotion) and negative display rules (suppress differentiating emotions) on their members. Positive display rules generally trigger group-level deep acting, whereby teammates seek to change their internal feelings. Negative display rules generally trigger surface acting, whereby teammates retain their actual emotions but do not actually express differentiating feelings. These two dimensions of emotional labor, for their part, impact emotional exhaustion. Deep acting one's positive emotions lowers emotional exhaustion and surface acting increases it. We discuss the consequences of our model for workplace behavior, such as performance. We also discuss how the relationships involving emotional labor change when one considers these constructs at the group-level of analysis.

In this overview, the editors trace the history of 10 books they have helmed in what has become the legacy of the Emonet conferences. From the seeds planted in 1998 by a small group of international scholars assembled together at the first Emonet conference, the shift of the study of emotions in organizational studies from the almost “undiscussable” to mainstream scholarship is traced. Following this historical analysis, the story of “What have we learned? Ten years on,” the latest volume in the Emonet book series, is given. In a brief summary of each chapter in the current edition, the editors draw attention to eight topic areas to showcase the remarkable and broad-ranging advances in the field of organization studies that have been enabled by attention to the role of emotions in theory and practice in 10 years since the first publication in the book series. From advances in our knowledge and understanding of work, workers and consumers, to team behavior, leader-member exchange, and In Extremis work contexts, and methodological contributions in the assessment of noncognitive traits through to advances in knowledge of positive work environments, the reader is left in no doubt that organizational scholarship and practice has been deeply enriched through bringing emotions center stage.