Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Emotions have various effects in work life and in organizational social interaction. Daily work events evoke emotional reactions, which are communicated to colleagues and clients. The communicated emotions may evoke corresponding affective response in the perceiver and, thus, the emotions become social. Existing emotional state may have an effect on the performance of work tasks, such as decision making, and also on social interaction, whether it happens face-to-face or mediated by some communication technology. Due to the hierarchical nature of organizations there may also be, often implicit, rules for expressing certain emotions, depending on one’s social status. In this dissertation, self-reports and psychophysiological measurements are used in the study of emotions in organizational social interaction, utilizing both, controlled laboratory experiments and also field studies in actual work settings. The four studies of the dissertation focus on two research lines: 1) the dispositional effects of personality and trait emotional intelligence on emotions during dyadic face-to-face social interaction, and 2) emotional processes during technology-mediated social interaction when conducting work tasks, such as planning and decision-making. The current dissertation focuses on emotions on four of the five organizational levels of the Ashkanasy’s (2003) model, that is, Within-person level, Between-persons level, Interpersonal interactions level, and Groups and teams level. The work is organized to six research questions, which address the relationship between emotional expressions and internal motivation state with behavior in a social decision-making task, the role of trait emotional intelligence and personality in emotional processes during organizational face-to-face social interaction, emotional contagion and emotion regulation in technology-mediated social interaction, and the effects that technology-mediated group emotional state has to the individual. Regarding the first research question, it was shown that during social decision-making task with a computer-controlled virtual character the participant’s facial muscle activation that is indicative of negative valence emotional expressions was related to their decision to deflect the possibility for cooperation. Deflection enabled higher pay-off in the task; the frontal asymmetry of the electroencephalogram, indexing approach motivation, was related to the anticipated high pay-off achievement rather than to establishing cooperation. Both, trait emotional intelligence and matching levels of Extraversion personality dimension were shown to be related to self-reports and physiological activity indicating positive valence emotional state during a performance review discussion, thus contributing to the second and third research questions. For the fourth research question, it was shown that emotional contagion occurred from a virtual character and also within a distributed group via a technology mediated cue of group emotional state. In addition, it was shown that there was emotion regulation when interacting with a virtual character, thus contributing to the fifth research question. Finally, for the sixth research question it was shown that contagious negative group emotional state had detrimental effects to the confidence towards the group. In sum, this dissertation contributes to the field of organizational social psychology and shows the viability of the quantitative method of psychophysiology in the study of organizational behavior also in real-life contexts.
Source: Työväentutkimus Vuosikirja
Author: Mikko Salminen
Language: English
Subfield: Social Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2890623943