Group affective tone

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Group affective tone represents the consistent or homogeneous affective reactions within a group. [1] [2]

Group affective tone is an aggregate of the moods of the individual members of the group and refers to mood at the group level of analysis. If the moods of the individual group members are consistent, then group affective tone can be treated as a group property. If, for example, members of a group tend to be excited, energetic and enthusiastic, then the group itself can be described as being excited, energetic and enthusiastic. If the group members tend to be distressed, mistrustful and nervous, then the group can also be described in these terms. Not all groups possess an affective tone; members of some groups do not experience similar moods. Even so, past research indicates that a majority of groups possess an affective tone. [2]

Two dimensions of group affective tone have been identified: positive affective tone and negative affective tone. [1] [2] Research shows that the two dimensions of affect emerge as independent factors [3] [4] and display independent patterns of relationships with other variables. [5] [6] [7]

Group members tend to experience similar moods based on several theoretical mechanisms, including the selection and composition of group members, the socialization of group members, and exposure of group members to the same affective events, such as task demands and outcomes. [2] [8]

Moods tend to be shared among group members through processes such as mood contagion [9] and impression management. [10] Group affective tone is associated with various organizational outcomes such as group prosocial behavior. [2] [10]

George's (1990) [1] demonstration that characteristic levels of the personality traits of PA and NA, within work groups, are positively associated with their corresponding (positive and negative) affective tones. Group affective tone is influenced by characteristic levels of personality traits within groups. These characteristic levels of personality have been theorized to be brought about by member similarity resulting from attraction-selection-attrition processes described by Schneider (1987). [11] Beyond personality, a number of other factors have been posited to explain why work group members tend to share moods and emotions, [2] [12] [13] for example: (a) common socialization experiences and common social influences; [14] (b) similarity of tasks and high task interdependence; [15] [16] (c) membership stability; (d) mood regulation norms and rules; [17] and (e) emotional contagion. [18]

George believes that a group's affective tone will determine how innovative (and effective) the group will be. An evidence to this belief is that when individuals feel positive they tend to connect and integrate divergent stimulus materials—they are more creative. [19] [20] [21]

George suggests that if all or most individuals in a work group tend to feel positive at work (the group has a "high positive affective tone"), then their cognitive flexibility will be amplified as a result of social influence and other group processes. As a result of these individual and group level processes, the group will develop shared (and flexible) mental models. In effect, groups with a high positive affective tone will be creative.

Analyses suggested that positive group affective tone fully mediated, and negative group affective tone partially mediated, the association between leader mood and group coordination. Successful leaders must efficiently regulate the affective tones of their groups. Leaders who are effective at managing the group's affective tone should have more impact on group processes than will their counterparts.

Related Research Articles

In psychology, a mood is an affective state. In contrast to emotions or feelings, moods are less specific, less intense and less likely to be provoked or instantiated by a particular stimulus or event. Moods are typically described as having either a positive or negative valence. In other words, people usually talk about being in a good mood or a bad mood. There are many different factors that influence mood, and these can lead to positive or negative effects on mood.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Job satisfaction</span> Attitude of a person towards work

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Attitude (psychology)</span> Psychological construct, a mental and emotional entity that inheres in, or characterizes a person

In psychology, attitude is a psychological construct that is a mental and emotional entity that inheres or characterizes a person, their attitude to approach to something, or their personal view on it. Attitude involves their mindset, outlook and feelings. Attitudes are complex and are an acquired state through life experience. Attitude is an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value and it is precipitated through a responsive expression towards oneself, a person, place, thing, or event which in turn influences the individual's thought and action.

Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affect (psychology)</span> Experience of feeling or emotion

Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood.

The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is the notion that, even when of equal intensity, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Affective events theory</span> Psychological model

Affective events theory (AET) is a model developed by organizational psychologists Howard M. Weiss and Russell Cropanzano to explain how emotions and moods influence job performance and job satisfaction. The model explains the linkages between employees' internal influences and their reactions to incidents that occur in their work environment that affect their performance, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction. The theory proposes that affective work behaviors are explained by employee mood and emotions, while cognitive-based behaviors are the best predictors of job satisfaction. The theory proposes that positive-inducing as well as negative-inducing emotional incidents at work are distinguishable and have a significant psychological impact upon workers' job satisfaction. This results in lasting internal and external affective reactions exhibited through job performance, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment.

Alice M. Isen was an American psychologist and Professor of Psychology and of Marketing at Cornell University. A prominent and widely published scholar, her research concerned the influence of "positive affect" on social interaction, thought processes, and decision making, including applications to organizational behavior, medical decision making, doctor-patient interaction, issues in services marketing, and issues related to brand equity and loyalty.

Dispositional affect, similar to mood, is a personality trait or overall tendency to respond to situations in stable, predictable ways. This trait is expressed by the tendency to see things in a positive or negative way. People with high positive affectivity tend to perceive things through "pink lens" while people with high negative affectivity tend to perceive things through "black lens". The level of dispositional affect affects the sensations and behavior immediately and most of the time in unconscious ways, and its effect can be prolonged. Research shows that there is a correlation between dispositional affect and important aspects in psychology and social science, such as personality, culture, decision making, negotiation, psychological resilience, perception of career barriers, and coping with stressful life events. That is why this topic is important both in social psychology research and organizational psychology research.

Group emotion refers to the moods, emotions and dispositional affects of a group of people. It can be seen as either an emotional entity influencing individual members' emotional states or the sum of the individuals' emotional states.

One way of thinking holds that the mental process of decision-making is rational: a formal process based on optimizing utility. Rational thinking and decision-making does not leave much room for emotions. In fact, emotions are often considered irrational occurrences that may distort reasoning.

Positive affectivity (PA) is a human characteristic that describes how much people experience positive affects ; and as a consequence how they interact with others and with their surroundings.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Negative affectivity</span>

Negative affectivity (NA), or negative affect, is a personality variable that involves the experience of negative emotions and poor self-concept. Negative affectivity subsumes a variety of negative emotions, including anger, contempt, disgust, guilt, fear, and nervousness. Low negative affectivity is characterized by frequent states of calmness and serenity, along with states of confidence, activeness, and great enthusiasm.

Despite a large body of positive psychological research into the relationship between happiness and productivity, happiness at work has traditionally been seen as a potential by-product of positive outcomes at work, rather than a pathway to business success. Happiness in the workplace is usually dependent on the work environment. During the past two decades, maintaining a level of happiness at work has become more significant and relevant due to the intensification of work caused by economic uncertainty and increase in competition. Nowadays, happiness is viewed by a growing number of scholars and senior executives as one of the major sources of positive outcomes in the workplace. In fact, companies with higher than average employee happiness exhibit better financial performance and customer satisfaction. It is thus beneficial for companies to create and maintain positive work environments and leadership that will contribute to the happiness of their employees.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Extraversion and introversion</span> Personality trait

The traits of extraversion and introversion are a central dimension in some human personality theories. The terms introversion and extraversion were introduced into psychology by Carl Jung, although both the popular understanding and current psychological usage vary. Extraversion tends to be manifested in outgoing, talkative, energetic behavior, whereas introversion is manifested in more reflective and reserved behavior. Jung defined introversion as an "attitude-type characterised by orientation in life through subjective psychic contents", and extraversion as "an attitude-type characterised by concentration of interest on the external object".

Social undermining is the expression of negative emotions directed towards a particular person or negative evaluations of the person as a way to prevent the person from achieving their goals.

Positive psychology is defined as a method of building on what is good and what is already working instead of attempting to stimulate improvement by focusing on the weak links in an individual, a group, or in this case, a company. Implementing positive psychology in the workplace means creating an environment that is more enjoyable, productive, and values individual employees. This also means creating a work schedule that does not lead to emotional and physical distress.

Emotions in virtual communication differ in a variety of ways from those in face-to-face interactions due to the characteristics of computer-mediated communication (CMC). CMC may lack many of the auditory and visual cues normally associated with the emotional aspects of interactions. Research in this area has investigated how and when individuals display and interpret various emotions in virtual settings.

Interpersonal emotion regulation is the process of changing the emotional experience of one's self or another person through social interaction. It encompasses both intrinsic emotion regulation, in which one attempts to alter their own feelings by recruiting social resources, as well as extrinsic emotion regulation, in which one deliberately attempts to alter the trajectory of other people's feelings.

In cognitive psychology, the affect-as-information hypothesis, or 'approach', is a model of evaluative processing, postulating that affective feelings provide a source of information about objects, tasks, and decision alternatives. A goal of this approach is to understand the extent of influence that affect has on cognitive functioning. It has been proposed that affect has two major dimensions, namely affective valence and affective arousal, and in this way is an embodied source of information. Affect is thought to impact three main cognitive functions: judgement, thought processing and memory. In a variety of scenarios, the influence of affect on these processes is thought to be mediated by its effects on attention. The approach is thought to account for a wide variety of behavioural phenomena in psychology.

References

  1. 1 2 3 George, J. M. (1990). Personality, affect, and behavior in groups. Journal of Applied Psychology, 75, 107–116.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 George, J.M. (1996). Group affective tone. In M. A. West (Ed.), Handbook of work group psychology (pp. 77–93). Chichester, UK: Wiley.
  3. ↑ Organ, D. W., & Near, J. P. (1985). Cognition vs affect in measures of job satisfaction. International Journal of Psychology , 20, 241–253.
  4. ↑ Watson, D., & Tellegen, A. (1985). Toward a consensual structure of mood. Psychological Bulletin', 98, 219–235.
  5. ↑ Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1980). Influence of extraversion and neuroticism on subjective well-being: happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 38, 668–678.
  6. ↑ Warr, P. B., Barter, J., & Brownbridge, G. (1983). On the independence of positive and negative affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 644–651.
  7. ↑ Watson, D., & Clark, L. A. (1984). Negative affectivity: the disposition to experience aversive emotional states. Psychological Bulletin, 96, 465–490.
  8. ↑ Weiss, H. M., & Cropanzano, R. (1996). Affective events theory: A theoretical discussion of the causes and consequences of affective experiences at work. Research in Organizational Behavior, 18, 1–74.
  9. ↑ Neumann, R., & Strack, F. (2000). "Mood contagion": The automatic transfer of mood between persons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79, 211–223.
  10. 1 2 Kelly, J. R., & Barsade, S. G. (2001). Moods and emotions in small groups and work groups. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 86, 99–130.
  11. ↑ Schneider B. 1987. The people make the place. Pers. Psychol. 40(3):437–53
  12. ↑ Bartel CA, Saavedra R. 2000. The collective construction of work group moods. Administrative Science Qoeterly 45(2):197–231
  13. ↑ George JM, Brief AP. 1992. Feeling good doing good: a conceptual analysis of the mood at work-organizational spontaneity relationship. Psychological Bulletin. 112(2):310–29
  14. ↑ Hackman JR. 1992. Group influences on individuals in organizations. In Handbook of I/O Psychology, ed. MD Dunnette, LM Hough, 3:199–267. Palo Alto, CA: Consult. Psychol. Press. 1095 pp.
  15. ↑ Gallupe RB, Bastionatti LM, Cooper WH. 1991. Unblocking brainstorms. J. Appl. Psychol. 76(1):137–42
  16. ↑ Heath C, Jourden FJ. 1997. Illusion, disillusion, and the buffering effect of groups. Organ. Behav. Hum. Decis. Process. 69(2):103–16
  17. ↑ Sutton RI. 1991. Maintaining norms about expressed emotions: the case of bill collectors. Administrative Science Quarterly 36(2):245–68
  18. ↑ Pugh, S. Douglas (2001). Service with a Smile: Emotional Contagion in the Service Encounter. Academy of Management Journal, 44 (5), 1018-27.
  19. ↑ Cummings, A. (1998). Contextual characteristics and employee creativity: Affect at work. Paper presented at the 13th Annual Conference, Society for Industrial Organizational Psychology. Dallas, USA, April.
  20. ↑ Isen, A.M., & Daubman, K.A. (1984). The influence of affect on categorization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1206–1217.
  21. ↑ Isen, A.M., Daubman, K.A., & Nowicki, G.P. (1987). Positive affect facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 1122–1131.
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