Cognitive asymmetry in employee emotional reactions to leadership behaviors

This article is predicated on the idea that leaders shape workplace affective events. Based on Affective Events Theory (AET), I argue that leaders are sources of employee positive and negative emotions at work. Certain leader behaviors displayed during interactions with their employees are the sources of these affective events. The second theoretical underpinning of the article is the Asymmetry Effect of emotion. Consistent with this theory, employees are more likely to recall negative incidents than positive incidents. In a qualitative study, evidence that these processes exist in the workplace was found. Leader behaviors were sources of positive or negative emotional responses in employees; employees recalled more negative incidents than positive incidents, and they recalled them more intensely and in more detail than positive incidents. Consequently, leaders may need to exercise their emotional intelligence to generate emotional uplifts to overcome the hassles in the workplace that employees seem to remember so vividly. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

From life in cages to life in projects: Metaphors for Moderns

© Anabella Davila, Marta M. Elvira, Jacobo Ramirez and Laura Zapata-Cantu 2012. All rights reserved. Historically, the metaphor of the iron cage, as a key component of Weber's (1978) sociological imagination has played a central role in organization studies. It did so both in its initial role in the sociology of bureaucracy and in its reinterpretation in institutional terms by subsequent theorists such as DiMaggio and Powell (1983). More recently, iron bars have given way to transparent liquidity as a dominant metaphor. The implications of this shift for the analysis of organization are the subjects of this chapter. We argue that a key technology of the liquidly modern organizational self is that of emotional intelligence and that, while this subject has been much written about, it has not been addressed in terms of its organizational effects on subjects. Technologies of the self are increasingly being developed that represent the possibility of a fusion of effective computing and emotional intelligence that generate new issues for research