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Summary Research into the role that emotions play in organizational settings has only recently been revived, following publication in 1983 of Hochschild's The Managed Heart. Since then, and especially over the last five years, the tempo of research in this field has stepped up, with various initiatives such as conferences and e-mail discussion lists playing significant roles. This Special Issue is another initiative in this genre. The six papers in the Special Issue were selected from forty submissions, and cover a wide range of contemporary research issues. The papers deal with the relationship of mood to job characteristics and to job satisfaction, manifestation of anger in dyadic relationships, perceptions and effects of emotional labor, emotional intelligence in selection interviews, and the effects of displays of sadness and anger by leaders. In this introduction, we broadly introduce the topic of emotions in workplace settings, summarize the six papers, and present some directions for future research. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Introduction
Interest in emotions in the workplace has accelerated rapidly over the past decade. The impetus has come from several sources and has led to bodies of research on a variety of topics. Although these bodies of work are not yet fully developed, they all show promise, and portend that the study of emotions in the workplace has the potential to add to our understanding of behavior in organizations.
Although the study of emotions in work settings has a long history (see Mastenbroek, in press; Brief and Weiss, 2000), the starting point for modern research on emotion in organizations seems to have been sociologist Hochschild's (1983) seminal book on emotional labor: The Managed Heart. This work inspired Rafaeli and Sutton's work (1987, 1989; Sutton and Rafaeli, 1988) which focused the attention of management scholars on emotional expression as part of the work role. Concurrently, Staw's frame-shattering work (Staw el al., 1986) on dispositional affect as a predictor of job satisfaction stimulated the rapid adoption of trait affectivity as a useful variable in organizational research. Trait affectivity subsequently fueled interest in state affect (mood), which was studied at both the group and individual level by scholars such as George and Brief (Briefer al., 1995; George 1989, 1990, 1991). Isen and Baron's (1991) review...