Abstract
Although neuroscience is currently gaining wide acceptance in organization science and management studies, some important questions remain unanswered and may hinder the development of so-called organizational neuroscience. Specifically, it appears that the usefulness and the applications of neuroscience methods to organization science are still unclear. Hence, the paper addresses this by examining the role of psychophysiology in investigating implicit emotional experience in organizational behaviors and by discussing how concepts from affective sciences and psychophysiological methods could provide a more complete picture of emotion in organization. Finally, we discuss some important points that should be carefully considered before using psychophysiological measurements in organization science.
Highlights
The implicit hypothesis of most dominant theories in organization science is that individuals can consciously report their emotions and subsequent attitudes
The main goal of this perspective paper is to discuss how psychophysiology can provide a more complete picture of emotion in organization science. It consists of answering three questions related to implicit emotional episodes in organizational behaviors: What is an emotion? Why do emotions matter in organization? And what do organizational researchers should consider when applying psychophysiology in investigating individuals’ emotion at the workplace?
Psychophysiology aims to understand the nature of emotion and to disentangle the relationship between emotional episodes and subsequent attitudinal and behavioral responses tailored to the workplace by means of a multimethod approach (Becker et al, 2011; Ashkanasy et al, 2014)
Summary
The implicit hypothesis of most dominant theories in organization science is that individuals can consciously report their emotions and subsequent attitudes. Neuroscientists (e.g., Bechara et al, 2000), behavioral economists (e.g., Kahneman, 2011), and later organizational researchers (e.g., Ashkanazy and Ashton-James, 2005) have pointed out that human consciousness is limited, which should encourage organization science to consider implicit affective processes as well (Barsade et al, 2009). The psychophysiological study of emotion would help organizational researchers to explore the role of workplace events in eliciting emotions and how these emotional episodes shape both physiological experience and action tendencies that influence the formation of subsequent individuals’ attitudes and behaviors
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