A growing body of research unveils the ubiquity of ambivalence-the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotional or cognitive orientations towards a person, situation, object, task, or goal-in organizations, and argues that its experience may be the norm rather than the exception. While traditionally viewed as something to be avoided, organizational scholars in fields ranging from micro-organizational behavior to strategy have made significant advances in exploring the positive outcomes of ambivalence. However, despite identifying benefits of ambivalence that are critical to organizing (e.g., trust, adaptation, and creativity), research remains fragmented and siloed. The primary purpose of this review is to advance research on ambivalence by reviewing, synthesizing and ultimately reconciling prior work on the negative consequences with promising emerging work on the positive-that is, functional and beneficialoutcomes of or responses to ambivalence. We significantly extend prior work by demonstrating that the myriad negative and positive outcomes of ambivalence may be organized around two key dimensions that underlie most research on the effects of ambivalence: (1) a flexibility dimension: inflexibility to flexibility, and an (2) engagement dimension: disengagement to engagement. We further discuss the mechanisms and moderators that can lead to the more positive sides of these dimensions, and suggest avenues for future research.

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When customers express anger, do they gain greater returns, as suggested by the proverb “the squeaky wheel gets the grease”? If so, does the intensity of the squeak matter? In four studies, we explore employee compensation responses to customers who express relatively high- versus low-intensity anger in service-failure settings. The studies demonstrate that the cultural value of power distance (PD) moderates the relationship between emotional intensity and customer compensation: High-PD service employees offer less compensation to customers expressing higher intensity anger, and low-PD service employees offer more to customers expressing higher intensity anger. For high-PD service employees, this relationship between emotional intensity and compensation is mediated by the perceived appropriateness of the anger expression; for low-PD employees, it is mediated by perceived threat. However, when perceptions of threat are mitigated, low-PD service employees offer higher compensation to lower intensity anger, and this effect is mediated by perceptions of appropriateness. This research is the first to examine the effect of anger intensity in service-failure settings. For managers, the findings illuminate the importance of adopting a cultural lens when designing emotion management training programs and when setting practices for compensating angry customers.