UTS21440 Chap.5 Positive Emotions and Managing Emotions at Work
Positive Emotions and Managing Emotions at Work
Week 5 of 21440 Management Skills at University of Technology Sydney covers the emotional half of a two topic week. It fixes the vocabulary first, separating affect, mood and emotion and distinguishing state from trait, then introduces the circumplex model whose two continua generate four familiar workplace states: work engagement, job satisfaction, burnout and workaholism.
It compares the ability and mixed models of emotional intelligence, covers emotional labour and the reported cost of surface acting, and works through broaden and build theory, the four resource types it proposes and the undoing effect, closing on gratitude and forgiveness as taught practices with named procedures.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Affect, mood and emotion: duration and specificity of cause
- 02
State and trait: positive and negative affectivity
- 03
Emotional contagion, and how a team converges on a group affective tone
- 04
The circumplex model: pleasantness and activation as two continua
- 05
Four quadrants: engagement, satisfaction, burnout and workaholism
- 06
The ability model of emotional intelligence and its four branches
- 07
The mixed model, and the argument for preferring ability models
- 08
Emotional labour: deep acting against surface acting
- 09
Broaden and build, the four resource types, and the undoing effect
- 10
Gratitude and forgiveness as practices, including the five step forgiveness formula
Working the five step forgiveness formula on an ordinary workplace grievance
- +1Recall the pain accurately rather than dramatically: what was said, in what setting, and what it cost in recognition, in a promotion conversation or in standing within the team.
- +1Empathise with the other person's situation, which means understanding rather than excusing. What pressure was that person under, and what did the claim buy them? The study reports that the more time spent on this step, the greater the forgiveness experienced.
- +1Offer forgiveness as an altruistic gift, framed as something you give rather than something the other person has earned, because the definition explicitly detaches it from desert.
- +1Commit to the decision publicly in whatever form is safe, since telling one person converts it from a mood into a position.
- +1Hold onto the decision when the resentment returns. The study used interventions ranging from ten minutes to just over two hours and reports that brief interventions may not produce full forgiveness but start people on the path, because forgiveness takes time.
Key terms
- Affect
- The umbrella term covering a broad range of feelings, taking in feeling states, which is to say moods and discrete emotions, and also traits, which is to say positive and negative affectivity.
- Emotion
- A feeling state that is generally short in duration and associated with a specific stimulus, distinguished in the chapter from a mood, which is more enduring, more diffuse and less tied to any particular cause.
- Emotional contagion
- The way an emotion moves from one person into the rest of a group, driven by a tendency to mimic non verbal behaviour and synchronise expressions, vocalisations and postures, producing convergence on a group affective tone.
- Circumplex model
- The proposal that affective experience arises from the intersection of a pleasant to unpleasant continuum and a high to low activation continuum, with no discrete borders between emotions.
- Work engagement
- The highly activated and pleasant quadrant of the circumplex when applied to organisations, described elsewhere in the subject as energy, involvement and efficacy, and distinguished from job satisfaction by its level of activation.
- Ability model
- The model that treats emotional intelligence as four ordered branches: perceiving emotions, using them to facilitate thinking, understanding and analysing emotion information, and managing or self regulating emotions.
- Emotional labour
- The requirement that a worker handle their own feelings to match rules and guidelines the organisation has set, operating through deep acting and surface acting.
- Surface acting
- Modifying only the expression of a feeling, so that a state is displayed which is not felt. It is reported as potentially leading to emotional exhaustion, unlike deep acting which modifies the feeling itself.
- Broaden and build theory
- The proposal that positive emotions broaden a person's momentary mindset, producing more creative, integrative, flexible and open thinking, and in doing so help build enduring intellectual, physical, social and psychological resources.
- Undoing hypothesis
- The proposal that positive emotions function as efficient undoers of the autonomic arousal produced by negative emotions, returning the body from a fight or flight response toward a rest and digest state.
- Hedonic adaptation
- The process by which an improvement in circumstances stops registering over time. Gratitude is said to neutralise it, alongside negative emotion and boredom.
Positive Emotions and Managing Emotions at Work FAQ
Why does the chapter insist on separating affect, mood and emotion?
Because the management response to each is different. Someone short with you once after a specific event is displaying an emotion; someone short with everyone for a fortnight is in a mood; someone short with everyone for three years has a trait. Getting the term right is what stops a reflection from treating a passing state as a character judgement or a long standing pattern as a bad day.
What does the circumplex add that a simple good to bad scale does not?
A second axis. Separating how pleasant a state is from how activated it is makes visible that job satisfaction and work engagement are different states rather than different amounts of the same thing. It also explains a common survey result, a team reporting high satisfaction and low engagement, which on a single index looks like noise and on two axes is a pleasant, low activation state calling for a change in challenge.
Is more positive emotion always better?
No. The chapter reports the relationship between positive affectivity and performance as probably non linear, turning negative past a threshold. A reflection that treats more positivity as always better has overstated the literature it is citing, and the same caution applies to the reported positivity ratio, which is a description of a tipping point rather than a target to perform.
Does emotional intelligence predict success in every job?
No, and the source is specific about it. The relationship is reported to be stronger where the emotional labour demand of the job is higher, naming counselling, call centre work, real estate and sales, and as a performance inhibitor in lower emotional demand work, naming accountants, scientists and mechanics. The chapter also names a dark side, in which emotional skill is developed as a tool for manipulation.
How is gratitude taught here as more than a mood?
As a practice with a definition and a mechanism. It is recognising benefits and gifts, feeling thankful, acknowledging their source and expressing appreciation, and it is said to promote savouring, self worth, coping and social bonds while neutralising negative emotion, boredom and hedonic adaptation.
The taught practice is a journal counting daily blessings rather than daily hassles, which is what the Individual Report asks you to keep.
Assessment move
Spend your first pass on the vocabulary, because this is the week where imprecise terms cost the most marks and the fixes are cheap. Learn the four branches of the ability model in order and be able to say why regulation comes last.
Then pick one of the two practices, gratitude or forgiveness, and be able to state its definition, what it is explicitly not, and its named procedure, since a reflection that runs a named five step sequence on a real incident will outscore one that describes the concept accurately. Keep the non linearity caution and the dark side note ready: both are cheap ways to show you read past the headline.
Working through Positive Emotions and Managing Emotions at Work in UTS21440? Sia is AskSia’s AI Management tutor — ask any UTS21440 Positive Emotions and Managing Emotions at Work question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how UTS21440 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
