Role of Positive Emotions in Organisational Coping

Abstract

The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions postulated by Barbara L. Fredrickson proposes that emotions like joy, interest, contentment, and love enable an individual to broaden his/her patterns of thinking and acting, which in turn build the personal coping resources, whether intellectual, physical, social, or psychological, by way of creating novel ideas, actions or social relationships. This paper is a review of 15 empirical studies carried out during 1998-2012 that support the contributions of this theory to the creation of a healthy workplace by fostering positive emotions in employees. Positive emotions were found to be pivotal in enhancing employee performance, encouraging innovation and creativity that result in sustainable business practices, helping organisations make good decisions, facilitating work-flow and motivation, developing authentic and charismatic leadership styles, job enrichment, better team performance, and satisfactory customer relations. A link between positive emotions and an upward spiral of personal and organisational resources has also been established where positive self-evaluation, development of resilience, a climate of social support, layout of clearer goals, high quality social-interaction, good health and productivity of workers have been found to promote effective coping.