Identifying Emotions in Organizational Settings : towards dealing with morality

Abstract

Emotions play an essential role in the behaviour of human beings, either at their sudden occurrence or by the continuous care to prevent the occurrence of unpleasant ones and to search for the occurrence of pleasant ones. Notably, in any system of collective action, they influence the behaviours of the actors with respect to each others. SocLab is a framework devoted to the study of the functioning of social organizations, through the agent-based modelling of their structure and the simulation of the processes by which the actors adjust their behaviours the one to another and so regulate the organization. This position paper shows how SocLab enables to characterize the configurations of an organization that are likely to arouse different kinds of social emotions in the actors, in order to cope with the emotional dimension of their behaviours. The case of a concrete organization is introduced to illustrate this approach and its usefulness for a deeper understanding of the functioning of organizations.