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This final chapter pulls together some of the observations and findings from the others in the book, and presents a final argument for undoing the ‘affectless consensus’ of research. It synthesizes a number of ‘affective scenes’ that are present across the various chapters, and uses these to build an argument for why affect should not be understand as simply synonymous with emotion. It concludes with a proposal for an ‘affective project’ to build off the findings that are found in the book.

Taking an evidence from social exchange theory, this research examines the mediating role of affective commitment in the correlation between internal branding, employee engagement and job satisfaction. The moderating role of work environment on the link between internal branding and affective commitment is also studied in this research.

The data were collected by using well-structured research measures from 215 employees working in the BPO sector of India (Punjab and Chandigarh). The hypotheses were developed, and the conceptual model was validated by applying structural equation modeling. The data were analyzed by using two statistical packages, namely SPSS and AMOS.

The findings suggest that internal branding has a significant positive relationship with employee engagement, job satisfaction and affective commitment. The mediating effect of affective commitment on the relationship between internal branding and employee engagement was full, whereas on the relationship between internal branding and job satisfaction, it was partial. Work environment also moderated the relationship of internal branding with affective commitment.

The current study offers significant lessons to management thinkers, human resource (HR), organizational branding and marketing manager. However, BPO sector should be aware about the critical role played by internal branding to enhance affective commitment, employee engagement and job satisfaction of the employees. The role of affective commitment is also taken into account to study the effect of internal branding on employee engagement and employee's job satisfaction. For itself, internal branding cannot be considered as in isolation and is doubtful to be efficacious if the work environment is not encouraging to an employee as well as to the brand values.

This study offers significant lessons to management thinkers, HR, organizational branding and marketing manager. However, BPO sector should be aware about the critical role played by internal branding to enhance employee engagement, job satisfaction and affective commitment of the employees. An important role of affective commitment is also taken into account to study the effect of internal branding on employee engagement and employee's job satisfaction. For itself, internal branding cannot be considered as in isolation and is doubtful to be efficacious if employees are not provided an encouraging work environment.

Existing researches on internal branding are theoretical in nature and overlook the empirical impact of internal branding on employee engagement, job satisfaction and affective commitment from the BPO employees' perspective. The study also offers an empirical examination of potential mediator and moderator for internal branding.

The purpose of this study is to collect data that allows researchers to capture both affective and cognitive buy-in influenced by both product and product strategy targets.

Analysis of 13 salesperson interviews followed the cluster and axial coding of grounded theory interview protocol.

This study finds two types of buy-in that are uniquely contingent on the target, and for which are influenced by both cognitive and affective states of being. Additionally, it finds that either affective or cognitive states of being can both drive and inhibit salesperson buy-in of either target. While the targets of buy-in appear to be mutually exclusive, the cognitive nature of disconfirming evidence appears to directly inhibit both targets of buy-in while also resulting in negative affect.

Further study that uncovers the causal role of an affective state inhibiting buy-in after the introduction of disconfirming evidence is warranted.

Managerial training and messaging approaches for achieving the two buy-in targets will likely differ or focus on only one type for efficient training.

This study is the first to examine the simultaneous effects of the two underlying states of cognition and affect on buy-in development. It is found that the two states can influence each other to stunt buy-in. The present study contributes to sales behavior literature by allowing the possibility of a sequence of states that stunt buy-in, positioning simultaneous examination is vital to the conceptualization of buy-in.

The extant literature highlights the significant role of brand perceptions in buying behavior and brand equity. Despite the importance of brand perceptions and the proliferation of online brands, research in an online context is still scarce. The purpose of this paper is to address this gap by investigating the effect of positive and negative comparative affective states (online vs offline) on online brand perceptions. Consistent with existing evidence, highlighting the role of culture on brand perceptions and affective states, this research is conducted in a cross-national setting to identify the stability of the hypothesized relationships among countries.

The study uses consumer survey data from five countries (UK, USA, Australia, Canada and China). After imposing metric and factor variance invariance, we used multi-group CFA to test the hypotheses regarding the impact of positive and negative comparative affective states on online brand perceptions across the five countries in the sample.

The results show that positive comparative affective states have a significant and positive impact on online brand perceptions across the countries studied, although the impact size varies by country. The findings also show that negative comparative affective states, which are context-specific and not induced by any particular brand, have no effect on online brand perceptions across the country samples.

Managers can use the findings reported in this research to inform their branding strategies. For instance, managers may focus on triggering feelings of comfort online as these lead to more favorable online brand perceptions rather than on supressing feelings of caution, as the latter do not directly impact online brand perceptions.

The study builds on and extends the recent work of Christodoulides et al. (2013) by focussing on online brand perceptions and looking into the role of affective states in a cross-national setting.

The purpose of this paper is to extend earlier findings suggesting that affective diversity is always negative for group performance, by examining its influence on managerial decision performance in a more controlled environment.

In an attempt to mitigate some of the many methodological challenges associated with studies in “real-word” contexts, the authors chose to adopt a quasi-experimental research design involving teams of master of business administration students engaged in managerial decision making. This research design is consistent with previous research conducted in the area of affect and individual or group-level outcomes.

The results indicate that both positive and negative affective diversity are positively associated with managerial decision performance, although only the relationship with negative affective diversity is significant. Overall, these findings support the idea that affective diversity may constitute a strength in the context of managerial decision making. These results contrast with the findings of previous studies.

Further quantitative and qualitative investigation is recommended in order to clarify the contradictory results between the current study and previous research. Specifically, this investigation might concern the effect of contingency factors such as type of team (i.e. ad hoc vs long term), type of task and team-level self-regulation ability.

Since the seminal work of Barsade et al. (2000), no further studies have attempted to resolve some of the empirical questions emerging from preliminary research on affective diversity. The paper thus provides new insights into the effects of affective diversity.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to develop the construct of affective commitment in business‐to‐business relationships between customers and suppliers, as well as to introduce the psychological contract as a central antecedent to affective commitment.

A review of the literature on psychological contracts and relationship marketing relating to affective relationship commitment was conducted to make a theoretical contribution in a buyer‐supplier relationship context.

By focusing on the individual and incorporating relevant mental processes, theories on affective commitment have been developed. A model and propositions concerning the impact of psychological contracts on affective relationship commitment are suggested, where the psychological contract plays a central role in mediating the effects of several antecedents to affective commitment.

By focusing on the individual's role in affective relationship commitment, this paper contrasts with much of the earlier research, which has used the firm as the unit of analysis. For practitioners, using such an approach will provide a more realistic view of the dynamics in the relationship.

This study makes two main contributions. First, it develops conceptual clarity of the affective commitment construct by putting a clear focus on the individual. Second, it proposes a model that describes the influence of several antecedents to affective commitment, suggesting a central role of psychological contracts in explaining the presence of affective commitment in business‐to‐business relationships.

A piece of frequently given informal advice to those starting in the world of research is to ‘pick a topic you'll be able to stick with for three or four years’ – and often that's the end of it. This chapter suggests that we should understand the importance of confronting the ‘affective gap’ in how research is currently conceived. It does so by considering how usually we do not engage with the issues underlying this ‘sticking with’ and what allows us to sustain our attention and effort across the years of a research project. Through a case study of my own confrontation with the question of how I chose and changed my own PhD research topic, this chapter introduces the idea of affective research through an exploration of the concept of affect and its relevance to research. The first part of this chapter explores affect through a brief overview of four different scholarly literatures, to provide an initial framework and some clarity for what is often an opaque subject. This is then grounded through an affective engagement with the issue of choosing a research topic and how this affects our research. It concludes with a brief overview of the other chapters in the volume.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between mental simulation and affective misforecasting of hedonic consumption experiences.

The authors present a series of lab and field studies that manipulate mental simulation and experience type (ordinary versus extraordinary) and measure affective misforecasting and mindfulness. Data were analyzed using a combination of ANOVA and PROCESS.

Mental simulation before an experience causes negative affective misforecasting to occur for extraordinary experiences but not ordinary experiences. The authors further show that mindfulness mediates the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.

The findings provide insight into how thinking about experiences before consumption affects consumers’ actual engagement with the experience. This paper suggests that, by encouraging consumers to mentally simulate their experiences before consumption, marketers may cause consumers to miss out on enjoying their experiences to the fullest. Instead, marketers may want to maintain some mystique by encouraging consumers to “come see for themselves”.

The authors demonstrate a novel cause of affective misforecasting: mental simulation before the experience and provide initial evidence in support of a novel psychological process explanation (i.e. mindfulness) for the effect of mental simulation on affective misforecasting.