Organizational scholars examining the effects of emotions on employees generally assume that negative emotions produce negative outcomes. However, a nascent body of research challenges this view, suggesting that negative emotions can help employees navigate work demands arising from disruptive external events. We draw on the COVID-19 pandemic-a salient, prolonged event that stimulated widespread negative emotions-as a theoretically meaningful context to explore when and why negative emotions may yield beneficial outcomes. Specifically, we provide an integrative conceptual review synthesizing research from applied and social psychology conducted during the pandemic that identifies two pathways through which negative emotions produce functional individual-level outcomes at work. The first pathway captures direct effects driven by the unique action tendencies associated with discrete negative emotions. The second pathway, informed by the personality systems interaction theory, highlights contingent effects shaped by self-regulatory factors and external support from leaders, teams, or organizational policies. Our findings challenge and extend discrete emotion and affective shift theories by detailing how and under what conditions negative emotions from disruptive events can have functional outcomes. We bring necessary nuance to prevailing emotion theories and offer practical implications for leaders and organizations seeking to manage negative emotions during the times of hardship. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

By immersing participants in consistent virtual environments, VR enhances study realism, reduces confounding variables, and improves procedural control, offering a promising solution for scientists interested in studying behavior "in the wild." The availability and documentation of data enabled by VR also help address replicability challenges. Despite vast potential, VR research is hindered by fragmentation, proprietary tools, and a lack of standardized practices, which limit its overall impact. This collaborative study presents an interactive checklist to support VR research from across disciplines to meet three essential protocols-interoperability, procedural standardization, and data sharing-that address these challenges by promoting open science and providing a common, easy-to-evaluate format for researchers to present projects to ethics boards, reviewers, and beyond. Together, these protocols can help VR research overcome replication barriers, democratize access to advanced tools, and establish VR as a robust method for rigorous, replicable scientific inquiry.

While leadership development theory and practice often promote emotionally challenging programs designed to elicit negative emotions, it remains unclear whether individuals learn and develop from such situations. An interesting but unexamined question is thus, "When do negative emotions stimulate learning, and how?" Integrating the functionalist theory of emotions and the transactional model of stress and coping, we suggest that mindfulness plays a key moderating role in alleviating the known downsides of negative emotional experiences to achieving developmental benefits. We find that the relationship between negative emotions and learning performance is more nuanced, depending on mindfulness: In Study 1, we find that mindfulness is a critical condition that helps mitigate the negative effect of negative emotions on learning performance. In Study 2, we further demonstrate that mindfulness amplifies the benefits of negative emotions on learning performance. In Studies 3 and 4, we conduct controlled interventions to provide evidence that the interaction effect between negative emotions and mindfulness on learning performance is mediated by cognitive appraisals. Specifically, we find that mindfulness helps individuals appraise negative emotion as a challenge, which enhances learning performance. We discuss our results' contributions to the leadership development literature and the practical implications for leadership education and training.

When entrepreneurs pitch to investors, is it wise for them to disclose their flaws or should they rather not admit any weaknesses? Combining research in entrepreneurial finance with social comparison theory, we put forth a new conceptual model about when disclosing flaws elicits psychological closeness and results in investment. We distinguish between two types of flaws (agency-excess and agency-deficit) and consider the similarity between entrepreneurs and potential investors in these flaws. A field study and several experiments generally support our model. Disclosing agency-excess flaws does not generate closeness or elicit investment, even when investors possess the same flaw. Disclosing agency-deficit flaws can generate closeness and result in investment, but only among investors who possess the same flaw. Our research contributes to the entrepreneurial finance literature by showing nuanced effects concerning how flaw disclosures relate to investments; we also show that similarities between entrepreneurs and investors do not always pay off.

Understanding how AI influences employee emotions is becoming critical as organizations prepare for widespread AI agent deployment. While existing research has explored human-AI interactions in corporate settings, little is known about how employees emotionally navigate relationships with AI agents exhibiting distinct personality traits. This empirical study examines white-collar employees' emotional responses while interacting with three generative AI agents in a virtual workspace, revealing novel social dynamics enabled by AI technologies. Using qualitative methods and inductive analysis, our findings show that anthropomorphic AI agents evoke a broad spectrum of emotions, from connection and contentment to amusement and frustration, extending beyond those typically triggered by web-based AI agents. Notably, participants experienced new emotional subsets, including unique manifestations of relational assurance and perceived worthlessness, which introduces new emotional subcategories within established frameworks.Moreover, the visual embodiment of AI agents in virtual workspaces significantly shapes user expectations and satisfaction. While a more human-like appearance can enhance engagement, it also introduces risks—a mismatch between an AI's visual representation and its actual behavior can heighten disappointment if the AI fails to meet human-like expectations. As organizations integrate AI agents into the workplace, our findings provide key insights for designing effective human-AI interactions. We emphasize the importance of human-centered design approaches that foster, rather than hinder, employee engagement, ensuring AI contributes positively to corporate environments.

Due to recent technological developments, vignette studies that have traditionally been done in text or video formats can now be done in immersive formats using virtual reality—but are such virtual reality video vignettes superior to traditional vignettes? To address this question, we examine participants’ experiences within a fictitious organization by comparing their responses to a relevant and particularly sensitive organizational phenomenon presented either through written text, a video recording, or a virtual reality experience. The results indicate that participants prefer more immersive methods, and that these increase their attention to critical study details. Moreover, this augments the effect sizes of several measured employee reactions—particularly those with high emotional content—suggesting that virtual reality technology offers a promising avenue for developing ecologically valid vignette studies to measure employee affect. To facilitate and expediate the use of virtual reality video vignettes in organizational research, we provide organizational scholars with a step-by-step instructional guide to develop immersive vignette studies.

In many workplaces, managers provide some employees with unique privileges that support their professional development and stimulate productivity and creativity. Yet with some employees more deserving of a privileged status than others, co-workers feeling left out of the inner circle may begin to exhibit feelings of envy. With workplace envy and intergroup conflicts going hand in hand, the question arises whether co-worker acceptance of employee privileges—where conflict can be constrained through an affirmative re-evaluation of co-workers’ privileged status—may lower the envy experienced by employees. Using virtual reality technology, 112 employees participated in a virtual employee meeting at a virtual organization where they were exposed to a new workforce differentiation practice. We show through our experiment that co-worker acceptance of employee privileges negatively influences workplace envy, which was partially mediated by the anticipated ostracism of employees. Moreover, we show that this effect is only found for employees with privileges, who worry more about being ostracized than their non-privileged co-workers. We anticipate that our findings will enable managers to conscientiously differentiate between their employees, using virtual reality simulations to steer employees’ thoughts and feelings in a direction that benefits both employees and organizations.

Conference calls provide opportunities for chief executive officers (CEOs) to inform market participants (i.e., financial analysts and investors) about their companies' prospects. Much research has focused on how CEOs speak about business-related topics in these calls, yet surprisingly the literature has not considered how statements that go beyond financial information affect market participants. When we explored archival data of how CEOs of publicly traded U.S.-based companies from the Russell 3000 Index spoke about COVID-19 in conference calls as the pandemic began in 2020, we noticed that about half of CEOs made "human care statements" that expressed a concern for people, with seemingly little direct financial relevance. However, although these statements were largely generic, vague expressions rather than clear plans, we discovered that the more such statements CEOs made, the better their companies fared on the stock market when stock prices tumbled globally. Follow-up explorations unveiled a negative association between CEO human care statements and stock volatility, meaning that market participants discounted these companies' future earnings less. Our explorations suggest that it pays off for CEOs to go beyond mere financial information and show some humanity, with implications for downstream theorizing about CEO impression management.

Charisma is often attributed to leaders based on how they look, talk, and behave. Yet very little is known about the role of the physical environment in influencing attributions of leader charisma. The role of the physical environment is crucial because leaders inevitably occupy physical spaces that vary across contexts. In this research, we find that the grandeur of the physical environment, specifically in its ability to induce awe, enhances attributions of charisma for leaders who are not already known to be charismatic. First, in a field experiment, we show that a real business leader is attributed with more charisma when delivering a speech in an awe-inducing (vs. an ordinary) environment. In three follow-up experiments, we find that awe-inducing physical environments amplify charisma attributions and that this effect was diminished or absent for individuals already known for their charisma. Together, our findings contribute to the leadership literature by demonstrating the importance of the physical environment in influencing whether followers consider their leaders to be charismatic.

How might irrelevant events infiltrate voting decisions? The current research introduces a new mechanism-regulatory focus-by which incidental environmental factors can affect vote choice. Regulatory focus theory proposes that there are two fundamental psychological orientations in how people navigate their worlds: A prevention focus tunes cognition towards security, safety, protection, and risk aversion, whereas a promotion focus orients attention toward achieving growth and positive outcomes. We present a model for how wind speed on Election Day affects voting by shifting the regulatory focus of voters. We propose that increased wind speed shifts voters toward selecting prevention-focused options (e.g., restricting immigration, rejecting Brexit, rejecting Scottish Independence) over promotion-focused options (e.g., promoting immigration, favoring Brexit, favoring Scottish Independence). We further argue that wind speed only affects voting when an election clearly offers a choice between prevention and promotion-focused options. Using a mixed-method approach-archival analyses of the "Brexit" vote, the Scotland independence referendum, and 10 years of Swiss referendums, as well as one field study and one experiment-we find that individuals exposed to higher wind speeds become more prevention-focused and more likely to support prevention-focused electoral options. The findings highlight the political importance of incidental environmental factors. Practically, they speak to the benefit of absentee voting and expanding voting periods beyond traditional election days.

Support for populism has risen substantially during the past two decades. We investigate the extent to which the rising electoral demand for populist parties and causes can be explained by negative affect. Globally, negative affect has risen rapidly in recent years and has even been referred to by some as a "blind spot'' for politicians and policymakers who have failed to recognize its significance. We use a multi-modal, multi-method empirical approach, using data from a diverse set of geographical and political contexts. Across four studies, we demonstrate that negative affect – measured via self-reported emotions as well as automated text analyses of over 2 billion Tweets – predicts i) individual-level populist attitudes in global survey data (Studies 1a and 1b), ii) longitudinal changes in populist party vote shares at general elections in European countries (Study 2), iii) area-level Brexit voting in the 2016 UK referendum (Study 3) and iv) county-level vote shares for Donald Trump in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections (Studies 4a and 4b). We find that negative emotions—such as fear and anger as well as more often overlooked low-arousal negative emotions like depression and sadness—are predictive of populist beliefs as well as voting. We establish a boundary condition by demonstrating that the relationship does not hold for populist politicians who are already in power: Like other incumbents, governing populists do not benefit electorally when their constituents continue to experience negative affect after they have been elected. With negative affect being fertile ground for populist support, our research calls for politicians to alleviate rather than avail themselves of negative affect.

While prior work has argued that negative emotions can be detrimental to learning, leadership development theory and practice continue to advocate for emotionally challenging programs. Integrating the functionalist theory of emotions and the transactional model of stress and coping, we suggest that mindfulness plays a key moderating role in alleviating the known downsides of negative emotional experiences to achieving developmental benefits. Results from three studies support our hypothesis that the relationship between negative emotions and developmental outcomes depends on the extent to which one is mindful. While we found that negative emotions were inversely related to learning satisfaction outcome, the relationship between negative emotions and learning performance was more nuanced, depending on mindfulness: In study 1 with full-time residential MBA students participating in an action learning module, we found mindfulness to be a critical condition that helped to mitigate the negative effect of negative emotions on learning performance, and in study 2 we further demonstrated a positive effect on learning performance with EMBA students. In study 3, we ran a controlled intervention to show that challenge appraisal is the key mechanism explaining the interactive effect of mindfulness and negative emotions on learning performance. We discuss the contributions to the leadership development literature and the practical implications for leadership training.

Research suggests that firms with family CEOs differ from other types of businesses, yet surprisingly little is known about how employees in these firms feel and behave compared to those working in other firms. We draw from family science and management research to suggest that family CEOs, because of their emotion-evoking double role as family members and business leaders, are, on average, more likely to infuse employees with positive emotions, such as enthusiasm and excitement, than hired professional CEOs. We suggest that these emotions spread through firms by way of emotional contagion during interactions with employees, thereby setting the organizational affective tone. In turn, we hypothesize that in firms with family CEOs the voluntary turnover rate is lower. In considering structural features as boundary conditions, we propose that family CEOs have stronger effects in smaller and centralized firms, and weaker effects in formalized firms. Multilevel data from 41,200 employees and 2,246 direct reports of CEOs from 497 firms with and without family CEOs provide support for our model. This research suggests that firms managed by family CEOs, despite often being criticized as nepotistic relics of the past, tend to offer pleasant work environments.