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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the affective factors underlying conflict behavior. Traditional conflict research assumes that when individuals face conflicts they follow a rational process, thus denying the role of emotion-relevant variables. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 358 undergraduate students from the University of Santiago de Compostela were classified into four different affective groups (happy, inactive, sad, and surprised) based on their actual emotional experience and asked to complete ROCI-II. ANOVA were conducted to test hypotheses. Findings – Results reveal that affective groups statistically differ in their self-reported conflict management styles. Positive moods and feelings have been found to be related to the preference for more cooperative strategies. Research limitations/implications – This study is exploratory in nature and since hypotheses were only partly supported, future research should address this topic in depth. Practical implications – It has been suggested that, in order to handle conflicts properly, individuals should take into account both their cognition and emotion. Originality/value – This paper sheds light on current research in the prediction of conflict behavior by examining the impact of affect out from the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Researchers suggest that trust building may be challenging in the face of conflict. However, there is an emerging proposition that conflict is critical for trust. Using affective events and attribution theories as a framework, the purpose of this paper is to present a model of the mediating effects of positive emotional arousal and self-conscious emotions in the relationship between conflict and trust. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected from 325 students enrolled in varied postgraduate programs in a large business school. The authors employed Preacher and Hayes's bootstrapping SPSS macros to test the direct and mediation effects of the connection between conflict, emotions and trust. Findings – Results showed that task, relationship and process conflict were associated with differing aspects of positive emotional arousal (enthusiasm, excitement) and self-conscious emotions (guilt and shame). Similarly, behavioural guilt was linked with trust while emotions mediated the link between conflict and trust. Research limitations/implications – The authors acknowledge that there are possible covariates (e.g. how long ago did the conflict occur?) with the variables used in the current study. Future research should include such covariates in the study of the relationship between conflict emotions and trust. Also, the data were largely cross-sectional, drawn from a relatively small sample. In future, researchers should examine similar constructs with longitudinal data and in large organisational sample. In spite of the above limitations, the validity of the results presented in this paper is not compromised. The study extends self-conscious emotions literature by demonstrating that guilt and shame have cognitive and behavioural properties and with differing connections with conflict and trust. Practical implications – The paper's findings suggest that managers who want to engender trust in conflict situations should stimulate task conflict to arouse enthusiasm and excitement. These discrete emotions are critical for building integrity based trust. Alternatively, by managing reparative emotions of guilt effectively, managers may increase levels of perceived trust. Overall, the results suggest that focusing on the effect of conflict on trust without considering the positive emotional arousal and self-conscious emotions could yield disappointing outcomes. Originality/value – The study provides new insights into the influence of conflict on trust and the mediating role of emotions (e.g. guilt and shame) in the link between conflict and trust. The paper also offers a practical assistance to individuals interested in building trust, especially in the face of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Previous research has demonstrated the importance of emotion recognition ability in negotiations and leadership, but scant research has investigated the role of emotion recognition ability in service contexts. The purpose of this paper is to propose and test a compensatory model in which service employees’ emotion recognition ability helps enhance their job performance, particularly when employees score low on the agreeableness personality dimension or have low cognitive ability. Design/methodology/approach – With a two-wave multisource dataset collected from a service center of a large retail bank, multiple regression analysis was used to test the moderating roles of agreeableness and cognitive ability on the relationship between service employees’ emotion recognition ability and their performance. Findings – Service employees’ emotion recognition ability helped enhance their job performance. However, the positive effect of emotion recognition ability on job performance was only statistically significant when employees’ agreeableness or cognitive ability was low. Practical implications – The findings have important implications for how service organizations select and recruit employees. In particular, service employees with low agreeableness or cognitive ability may still be able to perform well when possessing high emotion recognition ability. Therefore, emotion recognition ability should be considered in the selection and recruitment process. Originality/value – Going beyond self-report measures of emotion recognition and using a performance measure from organizational records, this study is one of the first to examine how emotion recognition ability interacts with personality and cognitive ability in predicting service employees’ effectiveness in a service organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate decision-processing effects of incidental emotions in managerial decision-making situations. Design/methodology/approach – A complex multi-attribute, multi-alternative decision task related to international human resources management is used as a research vehicle. The data are obtained by means of an electronic information board. Findings – Happiness and anger cause the decision maker to process less decision-relevant information, whereas fear activates more detail-oriented processing. The results are explained within the valence model and cognitive-appraisal framework. Research limitations/implications – A boundary condition of the study is the level of induced emotions. Processing effects of extremely high levels of emotions are not examined, which necessarily limits the generalizability of the findings. Also, the experiment focusses on the decision-processing effects of single isolated emotions extracted by manipulations; future research needs to examine decision-making implications of an entire emotion episode, which is likely to contain emotion mixtures. Practical implications – For managers, this study demonstrates the importance of being mindful of how incidental emotional states can bias choice processing in complex managerial decisions. Originality/value – This study extends earlier organizational research by focussing on decision-making consequences of emotion, rather than those of mood or stress. It brings together research on incidental emotions and process-tracing methodologies, thereby allowing for more direct assessment of the observed effects. Decision-processing consequences of emotion are shown to persist throughout a content-rich managerial decision task without being neutralized by an intensive cognitive engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]