Studies of cognition and emotion in organisations: attribution, affective events, emotional intelligence and perception of emotion.

Abstract:

This article details the author's attempts to improve understanding of organisational behaviour through investigation of the cognitive and affective processes that underlie attitudes and behaviour. To this end, the paper describes the author's earlier work on the attribution theory of leadership and, more recently, in three areas of emotion research: affective events theory, emotional intelligence, and the effect of supervisors `facial expression on employees' perceptions of leader-member exchange quality. The paper summarises the author's research on these topics, shows how they have contributed to furthering our understanding of organisational behaviour, suggests where research in these areas are going, and draws some conclusions for management practice.

Keywords:

COGNITION; EMOTION; ATTRIBUTION.

1. Introduction

Over recent years, scholars in organisational behaviour have begun to focus on the way people think and feel in organisations. In this article, I present an outline of my own involvement in this movement, focusing on research into the attribution theory of leadership and, more recently, on the role of emotions in organisational settings.

2. The Attribution Theory of Leadership

The early conceptualisation of leadership was that leaders are characterised by certain enduring traits that predispose them to leadership roles (see Stogdill 1974). This view was later superseded by theories of leadership style, and then contingency theories, where leader behaviour was approached as an interaction of leader, follower, and environment (e.g. Fiedler 1967; House 1971). These theories are more sophisticated than the earlier models, and feature prominently in introductory organisational behaviour textbooks (e.g. Ivancevich, Olekalns & Matteson 1997), but they provide little explanation of the cognitive processes underlying leadership decisions and behaviour. This issue was addressed in the attribution theory of leadership, initially proposed by Green and Mitchell (1979).

Attribution theory is derived from Heider's (1954) concept of people as `naive scientists'. In this concept, people actively search for explanations of the behaviour that they observe, and form hypotheses as to the causes of the behaviour that they observe. The resulting causal attributions determine, in turn, cognitive, affective, and behavioural responses toward the actor. Weiner (see Weiner et al. 1972) proposed a simple two-dimensional representation of causal attributions, based on perceptions of dimensions of locus of causality and stability. These dimensions, in turn, defined four basic types of causal attribution. Effort and ability are internal attributions. Effort is unstable, while ability is stable. The external attributions are task difficulty (stable) and luck (unstable). Kelley (1972) explicated the `Kelley cube', a three-dimensional model of the informational cues that determine causal attributions. These cues are: Consistency--the extent to which the observed behaviour is consistent with past behaviours; distinctiveness--the degree contextual difference surrounds the behaviour, and consensus--the extent to which others in the same situation behave likewise. Thus, a person who succeeds on a task and has a record of success on this task (high consistency) and also on other tasks (low distinctiveness), but where others often fail on the same task (low consensus) may be seen to have high ability (internal and stable). If, on the other hand, s/he has generally not succeeded on the task in the past (low consistency), the perception may be that success came about because of extra effort (internal and unstable).

Attribution theory entered the mainstream of organisational literature with the publication of Green and Mitchell (1979), followed shortly after by Knowlton and Mitchell (1980) and Mitchell, Green and Wood (1981). In the attribution model of leadership, subordinate performance observed by the leader is translated into the leader's behavioural response based on his or her attributions as to the causes of the subordinate's behaviour. In the example above, although the subordinate performs well in each case, the leader's responses to the subordinate are likely to be very different. The subordinate in the second instance is likely to receive a greater contingent reward than the in the first.

Although the original team that developed the attribution model did a good deal of research to validate aspects of the theory (e.g. Mitchell & Kalb 1981, 1982), no study at that point in time had tested the model as a whole, including its core propositions. In particular, no studies had looked at the interactive effects of personality and task context in the model. Therefore, to test the attribution model, I conducted a series of studies to test supervisors' responses to observed subordinate good and poor performance.

The first study involved a pencil and paper test, where respondents rated their responses to hypothetical scenarios of subordinate performance that were systematically varied according to Kelley's (1972) Cube. Taken across successful and unsuccessful outcomes, this results in sixteen outcome-cue combinations, not unlike the examples given above. The results of this study, reported in Ashkanasy (1989) and Ashkanasy (1991), were supportive of the Green and Mitchell model, and also provided a comprehensive test of the relationship between Kelley's cube and Weiner's four variables of causal attribution. In the latter respect, results supported 11 of 12 (3x4) predictions.

A second component of this research involved a laboratory test of the Green and Mitchell (1979) model. In this study, participants supervised groups of three team members working on small drawing or construction tasks. The team members, however, were confederates, programmed to succeed or fail on their tasks in a systematic fashion to provide the 16 cue-outcomes in the Kelley cube. Results of this study were reported in Ashkanasy and Gallois (1994), and provided further reinforcement for the attributional model, in that attributions were shown to mediate evaluative and behavioural responses to the observed performance. This study also provided a test of the role of personal locus of control and task context, as well as further validation of the Kelley-Weiner model. In addition, this study demonstrated that the nature of the task (operationalised as `according to instructions' versus `using innovation') and the leader's personality (Locus of control--see Ashkanasy 1985; Ashkanasy & Gallois 1987; Rotter 1966) were important determinants of leaders' attributional and evaluative responses to subordinates' behavioural outcomes. Specifically, an internal locus of control resulted in more internal explanations of behaviour, resulting in more person-oriented evaluations, while supervisors' perceptions of control led them to see a need for closer supervision of subordinates in future.

The third and final component of this research was a critical incident field study, based on supervisors' recollections of their dealings with subordinates who had recently performed well or poorly on a work task. Data on informational cues in this study were assessed using questionnaires, rather than by manipulation, but the results were again supportive of the core processes in the Green and Mitchell (1979) model and also of the Kelley-Weiner relationships (Ashkanasy 1991). The results of this study were reported in Ashkanasy (1995), and replicated in a subsequent study using Canadian data (Ashkanasy 1997). In respect of the latter study, which involved a cross-national comparison, the data supported the core propositions of the Green and Mitchell (1979) model, but also highlighted important differences that were interpreted in terms of Australia-Canada cultural differences. Specifically, compared to the English-speaking Canadians, Australian supervisors endorsed more internal attributions for subordinate performance, and focused on more individual characteristics in evaluating subordinates. This result was interpreted as reflective of a more individual and task-focused orientation amongst Australians compared to English-speaking Canadians, confirming similar results reported more than a decade earlier by Dragutinovich and White (1983). More recent research (see Ashkanasy, Trevor-Roberts, & Earnshaw, 2002) has continued to support the view that Australians are more assertive and individualistic than their English-speaking Canadian counterparts.

Attribution was most active as an area of organisational behaviour research in the 1980s (see Levine & Moreland 1990), and the importance of the role of attribution theory in organisational settings was further emphasised in Martinko (1995a). Recently, there has been a resurgence of research based on attribution theory. In particular, the increasing interest in the role of emotions in organisations (see below) has created an opening for a re-evaluation of the role of attribution as a precursor of emotional responses, including workplace aggression (e.g. see Douglas & Martinko 2001). A further unexplored area that is beginning to attract attention is the role of emotion and attribution in motivation (see Martinko 1995b; Weiner 2000).

3. Emotions in the Workplace

Ashforth and Humphrey (1995) pointed out that the role of emotions in organisations had traditionally been ignored as a subject unsuitable to rigorous research in organisational settings. This position began to change in the late 1980s, following publications by Hochschild (1983) and Rafaeli and Sutton (1989), but emotion studies still continued to have little impact in the main-stream of organisational research, despite important subsequent publications by Fineman (1993), Goleman (1995), and Weiss and Cropanzano (1996). More recently, however, the position has changed dramatically, with a spate of books either published or on the way (e.g. Ashkanasy, Hartel & Zerbe 2000a; Ashkanasy, Zerbe, & Hartel, 2002; Fineman 2000; Goleman 1998; Lord, Klimoski & Kanfer 2002; Payne & Cooper 2001) and journal special editions in respected journals such as the Journal of Organizational Behavior (Fisher & Ashkanasy 2000), Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes (Weiss 2001), and Leadership Quarterly (Humphrey 2002) reflecting an upsurge of interest in the field (for recent reviews, see Ashkanasy, Hartel & Daus 2002; Brief & Weiss 2002). My particular research interests in this area centre on three topics: affective events theory (AET) (Weiss & Cropanzano 1996); emotional intelligence (Mayer & Salovey 1997); and perception of emotion in facial expression (Ekman 1992).

Affective events theory, proposed in Weiss and Cropanzano (1996), holds that environmental conditions in the workplace result in `hassles and uplifts' for employees, that Weiss and Cropanzano refer to as `affective events'. According to AET, it is the accumulation of a succession of positive or negative affective events that leads to positive or negative affective states in employees that, in turn, presage attitudinal states and behavioural responses. For instance, an employee who is hassled by a demanding boss (an affective event) becomes angry and disgruntled (an affective state), and therefore suffers job dissatisfaction (an attitudinal state) and begins to look for employment elsewhere (a behavioural consequence). At the heart of the theory is the idea that it is the affective state that mediates the effect of the (affective) event on attitudes and behaviour.

Empirical research in AET, however, is still under way, with little published to date (a notable exception is Weiss, Nicholas & Daus 1999). My colleagues and I therefore set out to examine the core propositions of AET, and to investigate extensions to the theory. Early results of our research into AET (e.g. see Ashkanasy, Fisher & Hartel 1998; O'Shea et al. 1999, 2002) have supported the mediation effect of emotions. For instance, O'Shea et al. (2002) found that participants' attitudes (task satisfaction and commitment) and behavioural intentions (to repeat the study) in a manipulated laboratory study were fully mediated by affect measured using the Job Affect Scale (JAS) (Brief, Burke, George, Robinson & Webster 1988) and the Job Emotions Scale (JES) (Fisher 1998). Work is continuing on a field replication of this study.

A second line of research in emotions involves the controversial construct of emotional intelligence, first introduced by Salovey and Mayer (1990). Although popularised by Goleman (1995), there have been some strongly worded criticisms of the construct concerning both conceptual and measurement issues (e.g. see Davies, Stankov & Roberts 1998). In this respect, my co-authors and I have been careful to adhere to Mayer and Salovey's (1997) definitions of emotional intelligence as an ability to perceive, to process, to understand, and to manage emotions in self and others (e.g. see Jordan, Ashkanasy & Hartel 2002). This research led to the development of the `Workgroup Emotional Intelligence Profile' (WEIP) that we have used in a promising early study of the role of emotional intelligence in work teams (Jordan, Ashkanasy, Hartel & Hooper, 2002). In this study, student participants were organised into `semi-autonomous learning teams' in a class based on student centred learning principles (see Engel 1993). Teams received coaching in goal setting and interpersonal skills over a 9-week period. Weekly logbooks kept by the teams were later coded to assess the teams' performance on the course skills. At the end of the 9-week period, team members completed the WEIP. Results of this study showed that low emotional intelligence work teams performed initially at a lower level than high emotional intelligence teams, but that both high and low emotional intelligence teams performed equally well at the end of the period, suggesting that coaching can substitute for a lack of innate ability based on emotional intelligence. More recently, we developed a model of the role of emotional intelligence in organisations, where we argue that employees' responses to job insecurity are moderated by emotional intelligence (see Jordan, Ashkanasy & Hartel 2000, 2002). Research to test this model is currently under way.

The third line of research that I am pursuing involves the effect of perceptions of emotional expression in faces (cf. Ekman 1992). To this end, I recently began a series of studies to determine the extent to which leader-member relations are affected by subordinates' reading of supervisors' emotional expression influences the quality of leader-member exchange. Results of a preliminary laboratory study (Newcombe & Ashkanasy, in press) have indicated that subordinates are more influenced by perception of non-verbal cues in leader-member interactions than by the content of the message being communicated verbally. In this study, participants viewed video vignettes of supervisors delivering positive and negative feedback while displaying positive and negative affect. Reactions to the leader were measured using the 7-item negotiation latitude scale developed by Graen, Novak & Sommerkamp (1982), which is a measure of leader-member exchange quality (LMX) (Dansereau, Graen & Haga 1975). Results showed that reactions to the leader were determined more strongly by the leader's perceived facial expression than by the positive or negative feedback itself. Indeed, the most negative reaction resulted when positive feedback was delivered with negative affect.

In sum, research into the role and effect of emotions in organisations is opening up a new and exciting area of study (see Ashkanasy, Hartel & Zerbe 2000b). One particularly promising avenue is to couple the study of emotions in organisations with the recent interest in multi-level theory (e.g. see Kozlowski & Klein 2000). In this respect, I have recently proposed a multi-level theory of emotions in organisations (Ashkanasy, in press), where emotions play a role at five levels: within-person, individual, dyadic, group, and organisational. Examples of the thrust of research at each level are Fisher's (2000) work on emotions and individual and within-person variations in affect; a model of leadership and emotions (Ashkanasy & Tse 2000); work on emotional intelligence in groups (Jordan, Ashkanasy, Hartel & Hooper, 2002); and work in progress on emotional climate, an organisational level phenomenon (Nicholson & Ashkanasy 1999).

Looking at the broader perspective, I note that Brief and Weiss (2002) argue that research into the role of emotions in work settings to date has been too narrowly confined to studies of positive and negative mood and affect (see also Ashkanasy, Hartel & Daus 2002). They call for emotion researchers to study more discrete emotions such as anger and joy in reaction to events. Brief and Weiss also suggest that researchers need to look more closely at what they term `process issues'--the mechanisms whereby emotional expression impinges on organisational performance. In this respect, they suggest that Muraven and Baumeister's (2000) `regulatory resource depletion' model may be worth pursuing. In this model, emotional distractions in the workplace result in diminished work performance because of the emotional resources needed to cope with the distractions. Like Ashkanasy, Hartel and Zerbe (2000b), Brief and Weiss (2002) see the field of emotions research as opening up to a whole spectrum of exciting possibilities that we are only just beginning to discover.

4. Implications for Management

The fields of research outlined in this article also have important implications for practice. As I noted earlier, attribution theory is now firmly entrenched in the organisational behaviour textbooks, and has provided managers with cognitive explanations for everyday interactions that supervisors have with their subordinates.

In respect, of new knowledge about the role of emotions in organisations, sales of books such as Goleman (1998) tell us that practicing managers are intensely interested in this topic. In Ashkanasy and Daus (2002), we have set out to inform practicing managers of some of the key findings in emotions research. We stress in particular three areas of research in emotions in organisational settings that have important implications for managers. First, affective events theory tells managers that the ostensibly minor hassles and uplifts that people experience at work every day accumulate to determine organisational members' affective states, and these states can subsequently affect their attitudes and behaviours at work; second, work on emotional intelligence is introducing a new appreciation of the role of emotional perception, understanding, and management in organisations, popularised recently by Goleman (1995, 1998); and third, managers are now coming to appreciate the pros and cons of emotional labour in organisations, as popularised by Hochschild (1983), and the implications of these for management practice. In this respect, Ashkanasy and Daus (2002) set out five `tips for better management of emotions', as follows:

1. Rather than seeing jobs as purely rational undertakings, managers need to assess the `emotional impact' of each employee's job, and to design job assignments that take this into account;

2. Organisations are not cold places that people enter just to work. Managers need to create a positive and friendly emotional climate, and to model this through their own behaviour;

3. Managers can encourage a positive emotional climate through rewards and compensation systems;

4. Selection of employees and teams needs to be based, in part, on a positive emotional attitude. Managers should select employees on the basis of their record for engendering a positive emotional attitude in their work teams; and finally

5. Managers should seek to train their employees to improve their emotional intelligence skills and to engage in healthy emotional expression at work.

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(Date of receipt of final transcript: February, 2002. Accepted by Sharon Parker and Robert Wood, Special Issue Editors.)

Neal M. Ashkanasy, UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Qld, 4072. Email: [e-mail]

Neal Ashkanasy came into academic life after an 18-year career in professional engineering and management, and has since worked in the schools of psychology, commerce, engineering, management, and business. He has a PhD (1989) in social and organisational psychology from the University of Queensland, and has research interests in leadership, organisational culture, and business ethics. In recent years, however, his research has focused on the role of emotions in organizational life. He has published his work in journals such as the Academy of Management Review, the Academy of Management Executive, Accounting, Organizations and Society, the Journal of Management, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. He is co-editor of three books: The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate (Sage) and Emotions in the Workplace; Theory, Research, and Practice (Quorum); Managing Emotions in the Workplace (ME Sharpe). In addition, he administers two e-mail discussion lists: Orgcult, the Organizational Culture Caucus list; and Emonet, the Emotions in the Workplace list. He has organized three International Conferences on Emotions in Organizational Life, and is now planning the fourth conference to be held in England in July 2004. Prof. Ashkanasy is also on the Editorial Boards of the Academy of Management Journal, the Journal of Organizational Behavior, Applied Psychology: An International Review, and the Journal of Management. Finally, he was the 2001-2 Chair of the Managerial and Organizational Cognition Division of the Academy of Management.