Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks and Quy Nguyen Huy (2009), Organization Science 20(1):22–34 — DOI-10.1287/orsc.1070.0347
Key takeaways
Registered from the publisher’s abstract, not read. What follows is what the abstract says.
- Emotional aperture is defined as “the ability to recognize the composition of diverse emotions in a collective (e.g., group or business unit)”.
- The thesis is that a leader’s ability to respond effectively to “patterns of shared emotions” in strategic change “and other emotionally turbulent organizational processes” depends on using emotional aperture.
- The paper describes “cultural, psychological, and contextual enablers and impediments” to the focus and accuracy that aperture needs. It presents itself as extending emotional competencies, such as emotional intelligence, that “have focused more narrowly on individual-level emotions”.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-04 at the owner’s request, with four works on emotion in
groups and organisations. No anthology topic holds it, and it carries no
instruction for machine-learning practice. Deferred because it was not
read.
Its place in the batch is the perceiver’s side of collective emotion. Von Scheve & Ismer (LIT-696) define a collective emotion as convergence in affective responding. Barsade (LIT-706) shows one way convergence is produced, through contagion. This paper, by its abstract, asks how an observer recognises what a group feels when the group’s emotions are diverse, a composition rather than one shared state. That makes it the batch’s counterweight to treating group emotion as an average. A group half anxious and half enthusiastic is not a group that is mildly pleased. Barsade’s closing call for leaders “emotionally attuned to and influenced by their followers” is the competence this paper names.
For social ontology, the question it raises is whether a collective’s emotion is a distribution over members, an object a perceiver can read off as a pattern, or a state of the group. The abstract’s “collective emotions” and “patterns of shared emotions” suggest the first two. Whether the paper commits to any view of group subjects can only be said after a reading.
Priority for a reading: medium. The likely contents, a perceptual skill and its organisational enablers, are known from the abstract. A reading would say how the paper defines a group’s emotional “composition”, and whether it reports a measure or a study.