ABSTRACT
Traditionally, books on organizational behavior proceed in a linear fashion from the individual, to groups, and then to the organization as a whole. This volume is no exception. Organizations exist only because of the people within them. Consequently, understanding organizations first of all requires understanding the people who populate them, and especially their needs, drives, and capabilities. It is all the more surprising therefore to find that organizational behavior scholars, and behavioral science researchers in general, were so slow to appreciate the centrality of emotion in organizations (see Ashforth & Humphrey, 1995). Indeed, even today, many scholars are reluctant to accept an emotions-oriented explanation of motivation and behavior (e.g., Becker, 2003). Interestingly, and as Weiss and Brief (2002) pointed out, early organizational behavior scholars were deeply interested in the role of feelings and emotion, but this research seems to have withered with the rise of behaviorism in the 1940s and 1950s.
