ENDNOTES

1 J. D. Mayer, P. Salovey, and D. R. Caruso, “Models of Emotional Intelligence,” in R. J. Sternberg, ed., Handbook of Intelligence, Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 

2 The crash of the intimidating pilot: Carl Lavin, “When Moods Affect Safety: Communications in a Cockpit Mean a Lot a Few Miles Up,” The New York Times (June 26, 1994).

 

3 The survey of 250 executives: Michael Maccoby, “The Corporate Climber Has to Find His Heart,” Fortune (Dec. 1976).

 

4 The story of the sarcastic vice president was told to me by Hendrie Weisinger, a psychologist at the UCLA Graduate School of Business. His book is The Critical Edge: How to Criticize Up and Down the Organization and Make It Pay Off (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).

 

5 The survey of times managers blew up was done by Robert Baron, a psychologist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, whom I interviewed for The New York Times (Sept. 11, 1990).

 

6 Criticism as a cause of conflict: Robert Baron, “Countering the Effects of Destructive Criticism: The Relative Efficacy of Four Interventions,” journal of Applied Psychology 75, 3 (1990).

 

7 Specific and vague criticism: Harry Levinson, “Feedback to Subordinates” Addendum to the Levinson Letter, Levinson Institute, Waltham, MA (1992).

 

8 The concept of group intelligence is set forth in Wendy Williams and Robert Sternberg, “Group Intelligence: Why Some Groups Are Better Than Others” Intelligence (1988).

 

9 The study of the stars at Bell Labs was reported in Robert Kelley and Janet Caplan, “How Bell Labs Creates Star Performers,” Harvard Business Review (July-Aug. 1993).

 

10 The usefulness of informal networks is noted by David Krackhardt and Jeffrey R. Hanson, “Informal Networks: The Company Behind the Chart,” Harvard Business Review (July-Aug. 1993), p. 104

 

11 The comforting effect: Lisa Berkman et al., “Emotional Support and Survival after Myocardial Infarction,” Annals of Internal Medicine (1992).

 

12 Stress and death: Anika Rosengren et al., “Stressful Life Events, Social Support and Mortality in Men Born in 1933,” British Medical Journal 207, no. 17(1983): 1102-1106.

 

13 Limbic regulation: Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, A General Theory of Love (New York: Random House, 2000).

 

14 Emotional mirroring: Robert Levenson, University of California at Berkeley, personal communication.

 

15 Expressiveness transmits moods: Howard Friedman and Ronald Riggio, “Effect of Individual Differences in Nonverbal Expressiveness on Transmission of Emotion,” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 6 (1981): 32-58.

 

16 Groups have moods: Janice R. Kelly and Sigal Barsade, “Moods and Emotions in Small Groups and Work Teams,” working paper, Yale School of Management, New Haven, Connecticut, 2001.

 

17 Work teams share moods: C. Bartel and R. Saavedra, “The Collective Construction of Work Group Moods,” Administrative Science Quarterly 45 (2000): 187-231.

 

18 Nurses and accountants tracking moods: Peter Totterdell et al., “Evidence of Mood Linkage in Work Groups,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74 (1998): 1504-1515.

 

19 Sports teams: Peter Totterdell, “Catching Moods and Hitting Runs: Mood Linkage and Subjective Performance in Professional Sports Teams,” Journal of Applied Psychology 85, no. 6 (2000): 848-859.

 

20 The leadership ripple effect: See Wallace Bachman, “Nice Guys Finish First: A SYMLOG Analysis of U.S. Naval Commands,” in The SYMLOG Practitioner: Applications of Small Group Research, eds. Richard Brian Polley, A. Paul Hare, and Philip J. Stone (New York: Praeger, 1988).

 

21 The leader’s emotional impact in work groups: Anthony T. Pescosolido, “Emotional Intensity in Groups” (Ph.D. diss., Department of Organizational Behavior, Case Western Reserve University, 2000).

 

22 Leaders as the managers of meaning: Howard Gardner, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: Basic Books, 1995).

 

23 Informal leaders: V. U. Druskat and A. T. Pascosolido, “Leading Self-Managing Work Teams from the Inside: Informal Leader Behavior and Team Outcomes.” Submitted for publication, 2001.

 

24 Moods, contagion, and work performance: Sigal Barsade and Donald E. Gibson, “Group Emotion: A View from the Top and Bottom,” in Research on Managing Groups and Teams, eds. D. Gruenfeld et al. (Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1998).

 

25 Smiles the most contagious: Robert Levenson and Anna Ruef, “Emotional Knowledge and Rapport,” in Empathic Accuracy, ed. William Ickes (New York: Guilford Press, 1997).

 

26 Laughter is involuntary: Meredith Small, “More Than the Best Medicine,” Scientific American, August 2000, 24.

 

27 Laughter is “brain to brain”: Robert Provine, Laughter: A Scientific Investigation (New York: Viking Press, 2000), 133.

 

28 Laughter episodes: Ibid.

 

29 Good moods in a leader mean lower voluntary turnover: See, for example, Jennifer M. George and Kenneth Bettenhausen, “Understanding Prosocial Behavior, Sales Performance, and Turnover: A Group-Level Analysis in Service Context,” Journal of Applied Psychology 75, no. 6 (1990): 698-706.

 

30 Sober mood and high-risk decisions: R. C. Sinclair, “Mood, Categorization Breadth, and Performance Appraisal,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 42 (1988): 22-46.

 

31 Anger and leadership: Jennifer M. George, “Emotions and Leadership: The Role of Emotional Intelligence,” Human Relations 53, no. 8 (2000): 1027-1055.

 

32 Moods perpetuate themselves: A voluminous literature shows the self-reinforcing effect of moods. See, for example, Gordon H. Bower, “Mood Congruity of Social Judgments,” in Emotion and Social Judgments, ed. Joseph Forgas (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991), 31-53.

 

33 The Yale study of mood and performance: Sigal Barsade, “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion in Groups,” working paper 98, Yale School of Management, New Haven, Connecticut, 2000.

 

34 Bosses and bad feelings: John Basch and Cynthia D. Fisher, “Affective Events-Emotions Matrix: A Classification of Job-Related Events and Emotions Experienced in the Workplace,” in Emotions in the Workplace: Research, Theory and Practice, ed. N. Ashkanasy, W. Zerbe, and C. Hartel (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2000), 36-48.

 

35 Distress impairs empathy and social skill: Jeffrey B. Henriques and Richard J. Davidson, “Brain Electrical Asymmetries during Cognitive Task Performance in Depressed and Nondepressed Subjects,” Biological Psychiatry 42 (1997): 1039-1050.

 

36 Emotions reflect quality of work life: Cynthia D. Fisher and Christopher S. Noble, “Affect and Performance: A Within Persons Analysis” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, Toronto, 2000).

 

37 Job satisfaction is not the same as feeling good while working: Cynthia D. Fisher, “Mood and Emotions while Working: Missing Pieces of Job Satisfaction? ,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 21 (2000): 185 -202. See also Howard Weiss, Jeffrey Nicholas, and Catherine Daus, “An Examination of the Joint Effects of Affective Experiences and Job Beliefs on Job Satisfaction and Variations in Affective Experiences over Time,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 78, no. 1 (1999): 1-24.

 

38 Mental benefits of good moods: See A. M. lsen, “Positive Affect,” in Handbook of Cognition and Emotion, eds. Tim Dalgleish and ) Mick J. Power (Chichester, England: Wiley, 1999.

 

39 Good moods and performance: See C. D. Fisher and C. S. Noble, “Emotion and the Illusory Correlation between Job Satisfaction and Job Performance” (paper presented at the second Conference on Emotions in Organizational Life, Toronto, August 2000).

 

40 Insurance sales: Martin E. Seligman and Peter Schulman, “The People Make the Place,” Personnel Psychology 40 (1987): 437-453.

 

41 The impact of humor on work effectiveness: The findings are reviewed in R. W. Clouse and K. L. Spurgeon, “Corporate Analysis of Humor,” Psychology: A Journal of Human Behavior 32 (1995): 1-24.

 

42 CEOs and their top management team: Sigal G. Barsade, Andrew J. Ward, et al. “To Your Heart’s Content: A Mode of Affective Diversity in Top Management Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly 45 (2000): 802-836.

 

43 Improvement in service climate drives increase in revenue: Lyle Spencer, paper presented at the meeting of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 19 April 2001).

 

44 Poor customer service rep morale and decline in revenues: Schneider and Bowen, Winning the Service Game.

 

45 Mood affects cardiac care unit. Benjamin Schneider and D. E. Bowen, Winning the Service Game (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995).

 

46 Mood, customer service, and sales: George and Bettenhausen, “Understanding Prosocial Behavior.”

 

47 The analysis linking climate to business performance: David McClelland, “Identifying Competencies with Behavioral-Event Interviews,” Psychological Science 9 (1998): 331-339; Daniel Williams, “Leadership for the 21st Century: Life Insurance Leadership Study”(Boston: LOMA/Hay Group, 1995).

 

48 More technically, the styles were found to account for 53 to 72 percent of the variance in organizational climate. See Stephen P. Kelner Jr., Christine A. Rivers, and Kathleen H, O’Connell, “Managerial Style as a Behavioral Predictor of Organizational Climate” (Boston: McBer & Company, 1996).

 

49 Amy Arnsten, “The Biology of Being Frazzled,” Science 280 (1998), pp. 1711-13.

 

50 On stress intensity and impairment, see J. T. Noteboom et al., ‘’Activation of the Arousal Response and Impairment of Performance Increase with Anxiety and Stressor Intensity,” Journal of Applied Physiology 91 (2001), pp. 2039-10l.

 

51 Though that dysfunction holds for the brain’s temporarily crippled executive centers, the brain still makes a hedged bet that can work well. Consider studies of people under extreme stress in settings like firehouses, combat units, and basketball teams. Under dire pressure, the most seasoned leaders did best by relying on habits and expertise formed over years. A fire captain, for instance, could direct his firemen amid the chaotic uncertainty and terror of a blaze by trusting intuitions forged in a long history of similar situations. While old-timers instinctively know what to do in such high-intensity moments, for a novice the best theory can fail. See Fred Fiedler, “The Curious Role of Cognitive Resources in Leadership,” in Ronald E. Riggio et al., eds., Multiple Intelligences and Leadership (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2002).

 

52 On brain correlates of sadness and joy, see Antonio R. Damasio et al., “Subcortical and Cortical Brain Activity During the Feeling of Self-generated Emotions,” Nature Neuroscience 3 (2002), pp. 1049-56.

 

53 Positive moods, for example, can make people more realistic; when people who are feeling good have an important goal that they want to achieve, they will seek out potentially useful information even when it might be negative and upsetting. See, for example, L. G. Aspinwall, “Rethinking the Role of Positive Affect in Self-regulation,” Motivation and Emotion 22 (1998), pp. 1-32. On the other hand, an elevated mood is not necessarily best for every task: being too giddy bodes poorly for detail work like checking a contract. Indeed, negative moods can sometimes make our perceptions more realistic rather than overly rosy. At the right time, it pays to get serious. For a further review, see Neal M. Ashkanasy, “Emotions in Organizations: A Multi-level Perspective,” in Neal Ashkanasy et al” eds., Emotions in the Workplace: Research, Theory, and Practice (Westport, Conn.: Quorum BOOks, 2000).

 

54 On radiologists’ diagnoses, see C. A. Estrada et al., “Positive Affect Facilitates Integration of Information and Decreases Anchoring in Reasoning Among Physicians,” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 72 (1997), pp.1l7-35.

 

55 Anxiety erodes cognitive efficiency. For example, students with math anxiety have less capacity in their working memory when they tackle a math problem. Their anxiety occupies the attentional space they need for math, impairing their ability to solve math problems or grasp new concepts. See Mark Ashcroft and Elizabeth Kirk, “The Relationship Among Working Memory, Math Anxiety, and Performance,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 130, no. 2 (2001), pp.224-27.

 

56 On cortisol and the inverted U, see Heather C. Abercrombie et al., “Cortisol Variation in Humans Affects Memory for Emotionally Laden and Neutral Information,” Behavioral Neuroscience 117 (2003), pp. 505-16.

 

57 In describing the relationship between mood and performance in terms of the inverted U, I am oversimplifying a bit. Every major emotion has its distinctive influence on how we think. Our moods sway our judgments; when we are in a sour mood, we more readily dislike what we see; in contrast, we are more forgiving or appreciative while we are upbeat. See Neal M. Ashkanasy, “Emotions in Organizations: A Multilevel Perspective,” in Neal Ashkanasy et al., eds., Emotions in the Workplace: Research, Theory, and Practice (Westport, Conn.: Quorum Books, 2000). While good moods have great benefits, negative emotions can be useful in specific situations. “Bad” moods can enhance certain kinds of performance, such as attending to detail in a search for errors or making finer distinctions among choices. This mood-task fit has been mapped in more detail in the work of John Mayer at the University of New Hampshire.

 

For a review of how moods affect performance, see David Caruso et al., The Emotionally Intelligent Manager (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2004). Neuroscientists have started to map the specific ways different emotional states might boost various intellectual abilities. In the mild mood range at least, moods can facilitate specific tasks-and on a limited range of specific tasks, negative moods help at times and positive moods sometimes hurt. For instance, anxiety (at least at the levels instilled by watching a clip of a horror film) seems to augment tasks largely processed by the right prefrontal cortex, such as face recognition. Enjoyment (induced by watching a comedy) enhances left-hemisphere tasks such as verbal performance. See Jeremy R. Gray et al., “Integration of Emotion and Cognition in the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 199 (2002), pp. 4115-20.

 

58 Much the same argument has been made in George and Bettenhausen, “Understanding Prosocial Behavior”; and in Neal N1. Ashkanasy and Barry Tse, “Transformational Leadership as Management of Emotion: A Conceptual Review,” in Neal M. Ashkanasy, Charmine E. J. Hartel, and Wilffred J. Zerbe, Emotions in the Workplace: Research, Theory and Practice (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2000), 221-235.

 

59 Amy Arnsten, “The Biology of Being Frazzled,” Science 280 (1998), pp. 1711-13.

 

60 Thomas Sy et al., “The Contagious Leader: Impact of the Leader’s Mood on the Mood of Group Members, Group Affective Tone, and Group Processes,” Journal of Applied Psychology 90 (2005), pp. 295-305.

 

61 M. T. Dasborough, “Cognitive Asymmetry in Employee Emotional Reactions to Leadership Behaviors,” Leadership Quarterly, 17 (2006), pp. 163-178.

 

62 Neal Ashkanasy et al., “Managing Emotions in a Changing Workplace,” in Ashkanasy et al., Emotions in the Workplace.

 

63 James Harter, Gallup Organization, unpublished report, December 2004.

 

64 The poll is cited in Amy Zipldn, “The Wisdom of Thoughtfulness,” New York Times, May 31, 2000, p. C5.