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Researchers have begun to incorporate emotion as an explanatory construct in organizational studies. The present study sought to determine how the expressed emotion of top-level managers in a Fortune 500 organization undergoing a major transformation effort was associated with their assessments of change activities and job attitudes. Computer aided text analysis and the Dictionary of Affect in Language were used to assess the emotional content of responses to open-ended questions along two theoretically grounded dimensions of emotion: pleasantness and arousal. Results indicated that a hypothesized interaction between the two emotion dimensions explained significant variance in attitudes dealing directly with the managers’ jobs. Reasons for assessing emotion in transformation contexts are discussed.
Mossholder et al. (Fri,) studied this question.