Collective emotion regulation in an organisation – a plural agency with cognition and affect

Abstract

Purpose – While emotions and feelings arise in the singular personality, they may also develop a normative dimensionality in a plural agency. The authors identify the cybernetic systemic principles of how emotions might be normatively regulated and affect plural agency performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a generic cultural socio-cognitive trait theory of plural affective agency (the emotional organization), involving interactive cognitive and affective traits, and these play a role within the contexts of Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A). Design/methodology/approach – The authors integrate James Gross’ model of emotion regulation with the earlier work on normative personality in the context of Mindset Agency Theory. The agency is a socio-cognitive entity with attitude, and operates through traits that control thinking and decision making. These traits are epistemically independent and operate on a bipolar scale; with the alternate poles having an auxiliary function to each other – where the traits may take intermediary “balanced” states between the poles. Findings – Processes of affect regulation are supposed to go through three stages: first, identification (affective situation awareness); second, elaboration of affect is constituted through schemas of emotional feeling, which include emotion ideologies generating emotional responses to distinct contextual situations; third, execution: in the operative system primary emotions are assessed through operative intelligence for any adaptive information and the capacity to organize action; and turned into action, i.e. responses, through cultural feeling rules and socio-cultural display rules, conforming to emotion ideologies. Research limitations/implications – This new theory provides guidance for framing multilevel interaction where smaller collectives (as social systems) are embedded into larger social systems with a culture, an emotional climate and institutions. Thus, it is providing a generic theoretical frame for M & A analyses, where a smaller social unit (the acquired) is to be integrated into a larger social unit (the acquirer). Practical implications – Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion regulation is a prerequisite of managerial intelligence, which is at demand during M & A processes. While managerial intelligence may be grossly defined as the capacity of management to find an appropriate and fruitful balance between action and learning orientation of an organization, its affective equivalent is the capacity of management to find a fruitful balance between established emotion expression and learning alternate forms of emotion expression. Social implications – Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion is a prerequisite of social, cultural and emotional intelligence. The provided theory can be easily linked with empirical work on the emergence of a cultural climate of fear within societies. Thus, “Affective Agency Theory” also has a bearing for political systems’ analysis, what, however, is beyond the scope of this paper. Originality/value – The paper builds on the recently developed Mindset Agency Theory, elaborating it through the introduction of the dimension of affect, where cognitive and affective traits interact and become responsible for patterns of behaviour. The model is providing a framework which links emotion expression and emotion regulation with cognitive analysis.

“I feel and think, therefore I am”: An Affect-Cognitive Theory of management decisions

“…According to the latest advancements made concerning the role of affective states in management decisions (Cristofaro, 2019), featured by the application of the coevolutionary lens, it is derived that individual affective states (that can result from self-regulation), affective states emerging from dyadic relationships (i.e., interpersonal decision making), and group situations (i.e., emotional contagion) (Fink & Yolles, 2015) interact with each other according to the mechanisms of evolutionary "replicators" -elements that pass, like genes, to others through successive replications -and "interactors" -entities that interact with their environment causing differential replications (Hull, 1988). In other words, affective states positioned at different interacting levels -i.e., individual, dyads, groups -affect each other through their contagion (Ashkanasy, 2015) and form a final set of affective states that enter the decision-making activity (Cristofaro, 2019).…”

“…a different affective state of existing or new individual/group within the organizationis capable of strongly changing the replication of affective states (Cristofaro, 2019;Lazarus, 1991). In other words, the decision maker expressing affective states elicited by a management decision emotionally influences other organizational members and stakeholders (Fink & Yolles, 2015) and, according to a coevolutionary mechanism, the affective states are reinforced/adapted becoming inputs of new sensemaking activities. Therefore, affective states are not immutable; indeed, they are subject and object of the ever modifying, physical and social environment (aligned with the SSC approach), which comprises different levels, among them emotionally interconnected (Ashkanasy, 2015;Casciaro & Lobo, 2008).…”

Application of Financial Inclusions in Indonesia: A Study on Vulnerable Group

“…This understanding can be obtained by the dissemination, display of pamphlets, or symbols in a language that is easy to understand and contains many contents that encourage the public to use financial services (Bongomin et al 2018). The content is as suggested by Fink and Yolles (2015) that the cognitive-cultural conception of an institution emphasizes its central role which socially mediated with general meaning through language, systems, and other classification rules among individuals. Furthermore, this meaning mediated by the use of various cognitive frameworks, such as symbols and cognitive cues that issue specific issues and suggest ways that might be used to respond to this problem (Jordan et al 2019).…”

MADM Method With Interval-Valued Bipolar Uncertain Linguistic Information for Evaluating the Computer Network Security

“…But different from IFS, the value range of membership degree of the BFS is [−1, 1]. BFSs have been applied to logical reasoning and set theory [26], [27], Chinese medicine [28], [29], bipolar cognitive mapping [30], [31], computational psychiatry [32], [33], decision analysis and organizational modeling [34], [35], quantum computing [36] and [37], bio-systems regulation [28], [38], [39] and some other domains [36], [40]- [44]. Gul [45] proposed the bipolar fuzzy weighted and geometric aggregation operators.…”