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A critical evaluation of the organizational psychology research on the experience of emotion at work was undertaken by examining the extent to which research has characteristics appropriate to basic psychological approaches to emotion. Five characteristics were identified covering definitions, use of theory, design, and methods. A range of edited books and peer-reviewed journals were searched to identify relevant research, which was then examined for the expected characteristics. The results revealed relatively few empirical studies about experience of emotion at work and, in most cases, the expected characteristics were found in only around half of the studies. The implications of this for future research are discussed.

Purpose: To outline recent developments in digital service delivery in order to encourage researchers to pursue collaborations with computer science, operations research, and data science colleagues and to show how such collaborations can expand the scope of research on emotion in service delivery.

Design/methodology/approach: Uses archived resources available at http://LivePerson.com to extract data based in genuine service conversations between agents and customers. We refer to these as “digital traces” and analyze them using computational science models.

Findings: Although we do not test significance or causality, the data presented in this chapter provide a unique lens into the dynamics of emotions in service; results that are not obtainable using traditional research methods.

Research limitations/implications: This is a descriptive study where findings unravel new dynamics that should be followed up with more research, both research using traditional experimental methods, and digital traces research that allows inferences of causality.

Practical implications: The digital data and newly developed tools for sentiment analyses allow exploration of emotions in large samples of genuine customer service interactions. The research provides objective, unobtrusive views of customer emotions that draw directly from customer expressions, with no self-report intervention and biases.

Originality/value: This is the first objective and detailed depiction of the actual emotional encounters that customers express, and the first to analyze in detail the nature and content of customer service work.

Organizational behavior scholars have long recognized the importance of a variety of emotion-related phenomena in everyday work life. Indeed, after three decades, the span of research on emotions in the workplace encompasses a wide variety of affective variables such as emotional climate, emotional labor, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, empathy, and more recently, specific emotions. Emotions operate in complex ways across multiple levels of analysis (i.e., within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group, and organizational) to exert influence on work behavior and outcomes, but their linkages to human resource management (HRM) policies and practices have not always been explicit or well understood. This chapter offers a review and integration of the bourgeoning research on discrete positive and negative emotions, offering insights about why these emotions are relevant to HRM policies and practices. We review some of the dominant theories that have emerged out of functionalist perspectives on emotions, connecting these to a strategic HRM framework. We then define and describe four discrete positive and negative emotions (fear, pride, guilt, and interest) highlighting how they relate to five HRM practices: (1) selection, (2) training/learning, (3) performance management, (4) incentives/rewards, and (5) employee voice. Following this, we discuss the emotion perception and regulation implications of these and other discrete emotions for leaders and HRM managers. We conclude with some challenges associated with understanding discrete emotions in organizations as well as some opportunities and future directions for improving our appreciation and understanding of the role of discrete emotional experiences in HRM.

This paper aims to explore the role of the researcher’s emotions in ethnographic practice in accounting research. This paper focuses on shame as an emotion that lingers on, despite the efforts to work through those emotions.

The authors conducted a collective autoethnography to make sense of the fieldwork and after-fieldwork emotions and their consequences. This autoethnography began with the three authors discovering their shared feeling of shame.

Building on Hochschild’s theory (1979, 1983) on emotional labor, the authors demonstrate how shame emerged as a central and lingering emotion of the ethnographies beyond an emotional labor process. The authors show how a double shame appeared toward the field participants and the academic accounting community, affecting the writing and the work.

The authors demonstrate that the perception of the research community’s rules of feelings gives rise to emotions that ultimately change the work. The authors show how collective autoethnography can help accounting research to acknowledge and give room to emotions.

The aim of this chapter is to define and explore the group of emotions known as self-conscious emotions. The state of the knowledge on guilt, shame, pride, and embarrassment is reviewed, with particular attention paid to research on these four self-conscious emotions in work and organizational settings. Surprisingly little research on self-conscious emotions comes from researchers interested in occupational stress and well-being, yet these emotions are commonly experienced and may be a reaction to or even a source of stress. They may also impact behaviors and attitudes that affect stress and well-being. I conclude the review with a call for more research on these emotions as related to stress and well-being, offering some suggestions for areas of focus.

Leading occupational stress researchers have highlighted the need for more qualitative research to advance our understanding of occupational stress as a complex and dynamic process. However, qualitative research can be challenging particularly when it involves the exploration of emotive issues such as occupational stress. Although research institutions provide ethical guidelines for the protection and support of research participants, much less emphasis is placed on the impact of such research on the researcher. Yet in qualitative studies of occupational stress, participants often display a range of emotions to a researcher who is expected to be both empathetic and professional in his/her conduct. If qualitative researchers are inadequately prepared for the emotions they may experience in the field and poorly supported through the research process, then they may lose confidence and eschew qualitative research in favor of quantitative work thereby maintaining the status quo in occupational stress research. This chapter draws on both the literature on researcher emotion and the author’s own research experience to explore some of the problems encountered by qualitative researchers, and presents a number of recommendations to support qualitative researchers involved in the study of occupational stress.

The purpose of this paper is to do methodological review of the literature on educational leaders and emotions that includes 49 empirical studies published in peer-reviewed journals between 1992 and 2012.

The work systematically analyzes descriptive information, methods, and designs in these studies, and their development over time.

The review suggests that scholarly interest in educational leaders and emotions has increased over time, and identifies methodological patterns in this body of research. The results are compared with methodological data from other syntheses in the disciplines of educational administration (EA) and organizational behavior for the purpose of using the findings to produce broader insights into the meaning of an emerging research field in EA.

The findings of the methodological review are interpreted from two conceptual perspectives: functionalist and critical. Together, they offer a holistic portrayal of the meaning of producing scientific knowledge in an emerging research field in EA.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of emotions that consumers experience following service failures and to assess the effects of each of these emotions on important behavioral outcomes.

This paper extends the work of Wetzer et al. (2007) and draws upon the existing literature to test a series of research hypotheses tying emotions to four important behavioral outcomes primarily using stepwise regression.

When a service failure occurs, customers experience any of a variety of negative emotions. The effect on behavioral outcomes depends on the specific emotion experienced by the consumer. The current research, which benefits by using retrospective experience sampling, finds that frustration is the predominant emotion experienced by customers following service failure, but that anger, regret and frustration affect behavioral outcomes. Uncertainty also plays a role.

Future research should investigate the antecedents of propensity for emotions and predisposition toward industries, as well as the consequences of word-of-mouth (WOM) praise and WOM activity. Additionally, emotions could be examined by service stage. Several other moderators could be investigated, including severity, complaining behavior, repeat occurrence, service importance, remedies and forgiveness, product vs process failures, tenure, gender and age.

The current research emphasizes the importance of understanding which emotion is being experienced by a customer following service failure to identify the behavioral outcomes that will be most impacted. The specific managerial implications depend upon the specific emotional response experienced by the customer and are discussed separately for anger, regret and frustration. Service personnel must be trained to recognize and address specific customer emotions rather than to provide a canned or generalized response.

To date, there has been little, if any, systematic research into the effects of multiple discrete negative emotions on multiple desirable behavioral outcomes. The current study examines six discrete emotions. Predominant emotions are differentiated from emotional intensity. The behavioral outcomes of reconciliation and reduced share-of-wallet are added to the traditional outcomes of repatronage intentions and negative WOM. While existing research tends to rely on a scenario approach, this study uses the retrospective experience sampling method. The authors distinguish between mixed emotions and multiple emotions. The relative effects of disappointment and regret are examined for each of the four outcomes. Finally, importance-performance map analysis was applied to the findings to prioritize managerial attention. Numerous managerial and research implications are identified.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of emotions in fieldwork by applying grounded theory (GT). Although analytical guidelines in GT are well documented, the implications of researcher emotions have received much less attention.

This paper provides an “insider” account of the author's experience collecting field data during six months in a department of a Fortune 500 company.

It is argued that methodological emotional reflexivity (MER) as a part of doing GT will increase both awareness and understanding about how emotions influence the research process. MER comprises emotional awareness, empathic understanding and emotions in decision making.

The paper proposes acknowledging that emotions are part of, connected to, and both influence and are influenced by research decisions within GT. It is suggested that MER becomes an integral part of memoing in GT. Memos provides a link between data and evolving insights, and is considered fundamental in GT. The inclusion of MER provides a more transparent and adaptive GT approach.