Review
Implicit affect in organizations☆

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Abstract

Our goal is to integrate the construct of implicit affect—affective processes activated or processed outside of conscious awareness that influence ongoing thought, behavior, and conscious emotional experience—into the field of organizational behavior. We begin by offering a definition and review of implicit processes, including implicit cognition, motivation and affect. We then draw upon recent empirical research in psychology and neuroscience to make the case for a three category framework of implicit affect: (1) implicit sources of affect (2) implicit experiencing of affect and (3) implicit regulation of affect. To demonstrate the use of this framework in organizational scholarship, we present illustrative examples from organizational behavior research that represent each category. Given the limited amount of research in the organizational domain, we focus on demonstrating how an implicit affect perspective might alter or extend theoretical perspectives about a variety of organizational phenomena. We then discuss methodological options and challenges for studying implicit affect within the organizational domain. In sum, we provide a theoretical and methodological roadmap as well as a call for action for understanding the role of implicit affective processes in organizational behavior.

Section snippets

Early work on implicit processes

In the 1960s, a “cognitive revolution” began in psychology with the “three box” model of memory, which included sensory registers, short term memory, and long-term memory (for a review see Healy & McNamara, 1996). Although this model was the primary model presented in textbooks for three decades, it was silent on the question of consciousness. To the extent that consciousness was addressed in this model, it was implicit in the concept of short term memory, which was later expanded and renamed

Implicit affect

Given the evidence that both cognition and motivation have implicit components, it should therefore come as no surprise that the same is true of emotion: affective processes can also be implicit. As noted above, cognitive scientists have been using the term “activation” (Collins & Loftus, 1975) to refer to the extent to which a unit of information (whether an entire network of associations, or a node in that network) has been primed, so that it is not only exerting some kind of potential

Implicit affect in organizational behavior

Over the last 15–20 years, we have gained tremendous insights into many areas and outcomes of organizational behavior by incorporating knowledge of explicit affective processes (Barsade et al., 2003, Barsade and Gibson, 2007, Elfenbein, 2007). The construct of implicit affect has the potential to be just as generative. For each of the three categories of implicit affect we have described, we review organizational research that would fall under the rubric of an empirical study of that particular

Methods for examining implicit affect in organizational behavior

There remains a difficult question of how to measure implicit sources, experience, and regulation of affect in organizations, an area which has taken years of work to study in the laboratory14 let alone in field settings. With respect to implicit sources of affect, we suggest a two-step process. Determining whether the implicit

The implications of making implicit affect, explicit

Once organizational researchers have begun to examine the role of implicit affect in organizational life, an important next step will be to consider whether and how organizational members can become more aware of these processes. In research on implicit cognition, Langer and colleagues shifted their research agenda from the study of mindlessness to the study of mindfulness and its benefits, including in the work domain (Crum and Langer, 2007, Langer and Moldoveanu, 2000). There is some

Conclusion

We have described a number of challenges to the study of implicit affect in organizations, but we conclude with one final challenge that is attitudinal rather than methodological. Some organizational scholars may have been reluctant to examine anything “unconscious,” just as was the case in much of psychology for the better part of a century. Ironically, perhaps the greatest source of such skepticism may be the often implicit (and sometimes explicit) negative associations learned by

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    ☆

    We thank Art Brief and Barry Staw for their insightful comments and Marina Milonova, Jihae Shin, Julia Sodbinow, Chia Tsay and Victor Chica for their research assistance. Thank you to the Center for Human Resources and the Center for Leadership and Change at the Wharton School, University of PA, for financial support for this study. Last, much gratitude to CK for the inspiration.

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