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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.

Articulation of a vision is commonly held to be a critical component of theories of outstanding leadership – both transformational and charismatic leadership. Although there is reason to suspect that vision contributes to leader performance, less is known about the nature and origin of viable visions. In the present chapter, we argue that leaders’ visions can be viewed as a prescriptive mental model reflecting beliefs about the optimal functioning of an organization. To test this proposition, outstanding leaders possessing two contrasting types of prescriptive mental models were identified: ideologues whose models stress the maintenance of extant standards and charismatics whose models stress adaptive change. These two types of prescriptive mental models were associated with distinct patterns of leader behavior in a sample of notable historic leaders. The implications of these findings are discussed with respect to current theories of outstanding leadership.

In this chapter, we view team cohesion from a more generalized perspective of team dynamics, and focus on four leadership models for understanding these dynamics in teams in the context of the Mars Mission. Given the long duration of the mission with periods of no or intermittent communication and support, isolation and confinement, and the risk of great physical and psychological harm, having tailored leadership models for this unique team dynamics context is critical. And yet, many of these same dangerous conditions occur in other contexts such as for first responders, crisis management teams, Special Forces operations, and scientific exploration teams in extreme environments. As such, building from a model of leadership and team dynamics for dangerous contexts, for a long-duration space mission involving both Mission Control and the Astronaut Crew, these models of leadership and team dynamics include a collective-level approach for scientists and engineers, a primarily crew-based socioemotional approach, a leader-level crisis/emergency approach, and a dyadic or sortie-level approach. Implications of these models for effective leadership in building and maintaining team dynamics and cohesion for the Mars Mission and across a variety of other dangerous and extreme contexts are discussed.

Emotion and emotion-related concepts are interspersed throughout theories of charismatic and transformational leadership. Existing research in this area articulates expected relationships of global emotion constructs such as emotional intelligence, positive affect, and negative affect to leadership. However, there has been little attention to the potential roles of more specific emotions. This chapter describes some of the existing theoretical and empirical research on leadership and emotion, and proposes a framework to examine more systematically how specific emotions may influence transformational and charismatic leadership. The emotion framework is applied to two theories to demonstrate its utility in gaining a more in-depth understanding of how emotions influence leader communication, motivation, interpersonal relations, and relationship management with followers.

In order to shed light on whether and how leaders should help manage group members' emotions related to intragroup conflict, the aim of this paper was to investigate the effects of several outcomes associated with two cognitive emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and distraction, in the presence of two distinct types of conflict, relationship or task-oriented.

A 2×3 between subjects' experimental design was employed to investigate the influence of intragroup conflict and emotion regulations strategies on individual-level discrete emotions and group processes and outcomes.

Results suggest that emotion regulation plays an important role in moderating the negative consequences associated with relationships conflict. Specifically, distraction served a critical function to those in the relationship conflict conditions such that both cohesion levels and task performance levels were elevated when group members used distraction as a means of regulating emotions.

This study extends research in the area of emotion regulation into a group context and extends other research that suggests distraction may have potential as a means of regulating emotion. Long-term groups with experience in problem solving may have behaved in different ways than participants in this study.

Emotion regulation strategies have been studied only in an individual context. This study is particularly valuable in understanding how emotion regulation strategies work differentially when applied to multiple individuals in a shared setting. Additionally, it incorporates the use of distraction as a viable regulation strategy.

Joanne Abbey