EMOTION AS CURRENCY: AFFECTIVE PERSPECTIVES ON SOCIAL EXCHANGE

Abstract

This dissertation explores how affect influences continued engagement in social exchanges, focusing on helping behaviors between coworkers. In organizational settings, individuals often maintain unbalanced social exchange relationships, helping certain coworkers without expecting anything in return while expecting prompt and equal reciprocation from others. This challenges traditional social exchange and equity theories, which suggest that people track the balance of exchanged favors and that unreciprocated help leads to decreased helping in future exchanges. To explain why such seemingly imbalanced relationships persist, I propose the “emotion as currency” hypothesis. This framework suggests that experienced emotions during exchanges function as a form of psychological currency, shaping individuals’ expectations of reciprocation and influencing their future helping behaviors. Specifically, when employees exchange help, the emotions they experience accumulate over time, forming an emotional ledger with their exchange partner. When faced with a new exchange opportunity, the net affect balance (the cumulative emotional currency) can serve as either a previously received benefit or an incurred cost, thereby altering perceptions of entitled reciprocation. Furthermore, gratitude expressed by the exchange partner acts as an additional form of currency, reducing expectations of reciprocation and increasing subsequent helping. I test these hypotheses through three studies: a cross-sectional survey of working adults, a behavioral experiment, and a longitudinal field study involving undergraduate students engaged in semester-long group projects. The findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how seemingly unfair social exchange relationships are sustained, shifting the focus from purely cognitive explanations to a more comprehensive understanding that includes emotional valuation. This dissertation offers a novel perspective on the role of affect in social exchange, shedding light on how helping behaviors can be sustained in the workplace.