“Rude Awakening”: When Do Aggressive Emotions Invite Integrative Behavior in Work Dyads?

We combined the account of Emotions as Social Information and Regulatory Fit Theory to build and test a model specifying when and how aggressive emotion expressions may play a social-functional role in inducing integrative coping behavior among coworkers (dyads) with lateral relationships. As hypothesized, with data collected from 811 coworker dyads across 63 teams, Study 1 showed that aggressive emotions (like anger and frustration) expressed by a dyad member was positively related to the target’s (the member to which the emotions are directed) engagement with the expresser for integrative coping when the target was high on prevention focus and perceived low team goal interdependence. Further, Study 2 (with 734 dyadic data from 123 individuals across 20 teams) showed that the conditional relationship between expressed aggressive emotions and dyadic integrative behavior was mediated by target’s perception of expresser’s problem probing. Implications for research and practice are discussed.