Emotional Episodes at Work: An Experiential Exercise in Feeling and Expressing Emotions

Abstract

This exercise explores how organizations affect individuals’ feelings and expressions of emotion. Although recent attention by management theorists suggests that emotions are an important aspect of organizational life, people’s actual experience of emotions at work often do not reflect this emphasis: Work-place emotions remain, in large part, undiscussable. The purpose of this experiential exercise is to emphasize emotions as a central, rather than hidden, part of work life. In the exercise, students explore and discuss emotional “episodes” from their work lives to learn about how organizations generate display rules for emotional expression and what this means for individual and organizational effectiveness.