Human emotion has become an increasingly important topic in the studies of management, such as in the areas of organizational behavior, human resources management, marketing, information management, etc., in the past decades. According to Ashkanazy, Humphrey & Huy (2017), there were 260,000 articles from 2012 to 2017 that included the term “emotional labor” when searching through Google Scholar alone. In organizational behavior literature, emotion is found to be a critical factor that guides employees’ work performance and affects their organizational citizenship behavior and withdrawal tendency. In marketing, consumers’ emotional states can be a factor that affects the way they make transaction decisions and price judgments. Following along this trend of placing an emphasis on the study of emotion, NTU Management Review has published six articles between the years of 2010 to 2018 that included discussions of the antecedents or consequences of emotions in relation to management. The following is a brief introduction of the six articles. The authors of these articles have made contributions to the literature of emotion as well as provided added values to the theory building and practices of management.

"The Impact of Daily Emotion on Emotional Labor: The Perspective of Affective Events Theory" by Wan-Jung Hsiao

Firstly, “The Impact of Daily Emotion on Emotional Labor: The Perspective of Affective Events Theory” by Wan-Jung Hsiao reported a sample of frontline sales employees with daily observations across 25 working days. Study results show that daily positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) had a significant within-subjects main effect on daily emotional labor strategy. Also, between-subjects self-monitoring moderated the relationship between NA and deep acting. The findings provide important theoretical and practical implications regarding the daily emotion labor consequences of daily emotion.

"Sincere or Insincere? Exploring the Relationship between Emotional Labor and Innovative Behavior" by Sheng-Tsung Hou, Hsueh-Liang Fan and Wan-Chien Lien

Secondly, “Sincere or Insincere? Exploring the Relationship between Emotional Labor and Innovative Behavior” by Sheng-Tsung Hou, Hsueh-Liang Fan, and Wan-Chien Lien investigated a sample of truck drivers of a large transportation company. The authors found that employees with high role identification were more likely to engage in deep acting, and consequently exhibited higher innovative behavior. Also, contradictory to previous findings, the study showed that a competitive team climate strengthens the relationship between surface acting and innovative behavior. This study revealed the importance of role identification and competitive team climate on the impact of employee emotional labor on innovative behavior.

"The Effects of Consumer Emotion on Nine-Ending Prices" by Yin-Hui Cheng, Shih-Chieh Chuang, and Molly Chien-Jung Huang

Thirdly, the article “The Effects of Consumer Emotion on Nine-Ending Prices”by Yin-Hui Cheng, Shih-Chieh Chuang, and Molly Chien-Jung Huang showed that consumers’ emotions mediate the effect of nine-ending pricing strategy on their purchase intention. They found that consumers who felt happy have higher purchase intentions with respect to items with nine-ending prices than do consumers who felt sad. Also, their findings suggested that the above effect of positive mood leading to heuristic rather than systematic processing was due to consumers’ sense of subjective certainty. This research pioneers the research on incidental emotion and processing fluency on the nine-ending prices.

"Emotional Episode, Retaliation, and Altruism: Negative Online Word-of-Mouths after Service Failure" by Chih-Chien Wang and Yi-Huan Wu

Fourthly, the article “Emotional Episode, Retaliation, and Altruism: Negative Online Word-of-Mouths after Service Failure” by Chih-Chien Wang and Yi-Huan Wu examined the mechanisms of how negative emotions of consumers predict the intentions of negative word-of-mouths (WOMs) after service failure. The results showed that, when facing service failure, disappointed customers had a higher altruistic intention to help/warn others, whereas angered consumers had a higher revenge intention. The authors concluded that negative emotions, which usually derives from unsatisfied service experiences, motivate negative actions, such as spreading online negative word-of-mouth information, which can be harmful to the reputation of the company.

"Information Integration under Emotion Infusion: Theory Building and Empirical Testing" by Jen-Shou Yang, Hui-Yun Yu, Yi-In Lee, and Jui-Min Li

Fifthly, the article “Information Integration under Emotion Infusion: Theory Building and Empirical Testing” by Jen-Shou Yang, Hui-Yun Yu, Yi-In Lee, and Jui-Min Li examined how the behavioral tendencies under emotion infusion affect information appraisement of the decision-maker. This study applied an evolutionary and neurocognitive perspective and separated the effects of specific kinds of emotions (i.e., anxiety, anger and happiness) on individual information processing. Their results supported a theory of information integration under emotion infusion, suggesting that emotivational goals influence prior decision goals and behavioral tendencies and that these three factors jointly shape patterns of information weight and value, and subsequent decisions.

"Research Findings and Prospect of Workplace Deviant Behavior: A Review of 2000-2015 Studies with Asian Samples"by Shu-Cheng Steve Chi, Hsin-Hsin Lo, Shin-Guang Liang, Hsi-Fang Lai, and Chih-Chieh Chu

Lastly, the article “Research Findings and Prospect of Workplace Deviant Behavior: A Review of 2000-2015 Studies with Asian Samples” by Shu-Cheng Steve Chi, Hsin-Hsin Lo, Shin-Guang Liang, Hsi-Fang Lai, and Chih-Chieh Chu is a comprehensive review of the empirical works on workplace deviant behavior with samples from Asian regions that were published in key journals in the areas of psychology and/or management both in Taiwan and in the West from 2000-2015. Among the 81 articles identified, several examined specifically the impact of employee emotion on deviant workplace behavior. One study, for example, showed that daily stressors exerted an impact on employees’ daily interpersonal and organizational deviant behavior through experiences of negative affect, and the relationship would be moderated by the personality traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness. Another study showed that the relationship between customer mistreatment and employees’ daily sabotage of customers was mitigated by self-efficacy for emotional regulation. In the discussion, the authors proposed an integrated nomological network and proposed a research direction on relationships between employee emotion and deviant workplace behavior, especially under Asian contexts.

Reference:

Ashkanasy, N. M., Humphrey, R. H., and Huy, Q. N. 2017. Integrating emotions and affect in theories of management. Academy of Management Review, 42 (2), 175-189.