Agenda

Emotions affect many aspects of organizational life. Here we draw attention to the influence of affective states on tacit coordination. Tacit coordination is coordination without explicit communication. In particular, we argue that shared emotions affect tacit coordination by influencing cognitive processes that determine salient and focal alternatives. We thus devised a coordination-game experiment that includes an extended version of global/local processing tasks and a mixture of mood-inducing procedures. The experiment shows that positive emotions broaden attention and induce global processing, leading to enhanced tacit-coordination outcomes. Instead, low positivity, driven by negative emotions, narrows attention, and induces local processing, leading to less favorable tacit coordination outcomes.