How Emotions Move Us: An Integrative Framework for Incidental Emotions and Decision Making at Work

Incidental emotions—emotions elicited outside a decision context—can affect decisions at work. Extant theory emphasizes that incidental emotions affect decisions through the emotion's associated appraisals or interpretations of the environment. A related but conceptually distinct component of emotions is action tendency, or the drive to execute an action for a particular goal. We address prior theoretical ambiguities and disparate findings, introducing an Integrative Framework for Incidental Emotions and Decision Making in which these complementary but conceptually distinct components (i.e., the informational and the motivational pathways) of emotions can each affect decision making at work. We present contextual moderators for whether an incidental emotion's appraisals or action tendencies influence subsequent workplace decisions, including drive satisfaction, appraisal override, situation feasibility, and task compatibility. Finally, we outline implications for future theory development and methodology, as well as practical implications for managing incidental emotions’ effects on decision making at work.