The Affective Revolution in Organizational Behavior: The Emergence of a Paradigm
Sigal Barsade
We build the case that an affective revolution has been occurring within the study of organizations. In doing so, we describe “where we have been”: the pre-paradigmatic work of affective scholars in the 1930s and the evolution to the “normal science” of affect as job satisfaction. We then discuss the crisis in the job satisfaction literature which led to the beginnings of the affective revolution and the current state of the field. We describe the nature of affect as studied in the fields of psychology and sociology and how it currently is examined within organizational behavior - including research examining the effects of trait affect, state affect, emotional labor, the social sharing of affect in groups, and emotional intelligence. Our prediction for the future of the field is for more questions being asked and answered in the areas of discrete affect in organizations, organizational level affect, subconscious affective influences, developmental approaches to understanding people’s emotion at work, tracking affective patterns in “everyday emotion”, and emotion and research relating work in neuroscience and affect in the workplace. Ultimately, we foresee a mature affective paradigm - a paradigm in which relevant paradigms, disciplines and schools of thoughts co-exist and contribute to knowledge, rather than one paradigm “winning over” other paradigms. We predict that this type of mature hybrid paradigm will ultimately offer the most powerful lens with which to understand affect in organizations.