Today, there is a wide agreement that affect, such as emotions and moods, is a very valuable psychological process to understand cognition and behaviour at work. Discrete emotions are intense and short-lived affective reactions (seconds, minutes) toward an specific object (e.g. fear to be fired or happy for being rewarded). Mood, in turn, are mild and long-lasting (unfolding over days and weeks) without an explicit object (e.g. feeling enthusiastic or anxious). Moods have a causal object, but people are often unaware about it. Drawing on this, should discrete emotions or moods be a more relevant concern for organizational behavior practitioners?
Basic emotions often lie at the heart of decision-making in organizations when confronted with social emotional- or conflicts of interest. Conflict handling in these cases often stems from basic-and recurring reaction patterns (fight, flight or freeze, Van der Helm, Boekee, Stams & van der Laan, 2012). From these reactions a lot of organizational disasters can be explained.
Depending on the organizational goals, I think all organizations would consider discrete emotions important for understanding behaviour at work to a different degree.
Activities requiring teamwork would benefit most by the outcomes of these studies as they would formalize what HR personnel are concerned about duriing hiring and describe this understanding as being able to "match the team".
Discrete emotions may be short lived, but the reason for them is in memory, so that object or situation could immediately elicit the emotion again, so both emotions and moods would be important to understand. Moods without a cause that can be identified are moving toward clinical states such as depression (see Scherer, 2000), so we need to be carefull of semantics here.
Basic emotions often lie at the heart of decision-making in organizations when confronted with social emotional- or conflicts of interest. Conflict handling in these cases often stems from basic-and recurring reaction patterns (fight, flight or freeze, Van der Helm, Boekee, Stams & van der Laan, 2012). From these reactions a lot of organizational disasters can be explained.
To determine whether measurement of discrete moods are likely to be valuable, you need to first decide what you want to compare them with. If your interest is in how people respond emotionally to specific situations (e.g., dealing with a difficult customer), measuring discrete moods may well be valuable. But if you are interested in something that lasts much longer (e.g., project quality or team cohesion) or has longer-term consequences (e.g., turnover), then discrete moods are likely to be little use. For those types of outcomes, you would do better to use longer-term measures such as employee satisfaction. So, it's the level of analysis that determines your level of measurement.
It's a bit like comparing attitudes and behaviours. General attitudes to customers are not much use in understanding how an employee will respond to a specific customer, but they are useful for understanding how they will respond to most customers. Specific attitudes to a specific customer or group of customers will not be helpful for predicting how employees respond to most customers. Instead, you need to measure attitudes, and emotions, at the same level of specificity as the target you are interested in.
One caveat to Arthur's excellent answer is that emotive reactions to specific situations can be recalled when that situation arises again. In this way measures of discrete emotions may give some indication of longer term affective responses to an event or future event.
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