Agent-based modeling and simulation of the emotional experiences of employees within organizations

Agent-Based Modeling and Simulation (ABMS) have been used to study a wide range of complex systems and several emergent behaviors across a variety of disciplines. However, very limited works have adopted these paradigms to provide insights to organizational psychology in general and to researches dealing with emotions at work in particular. The current research uses ABMS to study the emotions experienced in the organizational context; it focuses specifically on their impact on the quality of decisions made as a key factor of organizations success. In this paper, the emphasis is set on the emotion generation process. The proposed work introduces an agent-based model of the emotional experiences of employees within organizations. It adopts a cross-disciplinary approach and it brings another theoretical perspective to agent-based modeling of emotions at work. In fact, this model is based on the OCC appraisal theory to generate artificial emotions, but it also takes advantage of theoretical foundations from organization behavior and organization psychology. Simulation results can bring new insights to organizational researches. Moreover, the simulated system can serve as a human resources development tool used by employees at work to enhance their emotional awareness.

[1]  Andrew Ortony,et al.  The Cognitive Structure of Emotions , 1988 .

[2]  Adrian Furnham,et al.  A Cross-Cultural Investigation Into the Relationships Between Personality Traits and Work Values , 2005, The Journal of psychology.

[3]  Maarten Sierhuis,et al.  Brahms: simulating practice for work systems design , 1998, Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud..

[4]  Stacy Marsella,et al.  EMA: A process model of appraisal dynamics , 2009, Cognitive Systems Research.

[5]  Pan Yuyou,et al.  Fuzzy Emotion Modeling for Human Behavior Simulation in Stressful situation , 2012 .

[6]  Dominique Longin,et al.  OCC's Emotions: A Formalization in a BDI Logic , 2006, AIMSA.

[7]  M. Rokeach,et al.  The Nature Of Human Values , 1974 .

[8]  Dirk Heylen,et al.  ParleE: An Adaptive Plan Based Event Appraisal Model of Emotions , 2002, KI.

[9]  Sandra Ohly,et al.  What Makes Us Enthusiastic, Angry, Feeling at Rest or Worried? Development and Validation of an Affective Work Events Taxonomy Using Concept Mapping Methodology , 2015 .

[10]  H. Weiss,et al.  Affective Events Theory: A theoretical discussion of the structure, causes and consequences of affective experiences at work. , 1996 .

[11]  Fahem Kebair,et al.  Agent Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Towards a New E-BDI Agent Architecture Based on Immediate and Expected Emotions , 2014 .

[12]  R. Lazarus.  Emotion and Adaptation , 1991 .

[13]  Tuncer Ören,et al.  Design and implementation of GEmA: A generic emotional agent , 2011, Expert Syst. Appl..

[14]  Elizabeth C. Ravlin,et al.  Individual Values in Organizations: Concepts, Controversies, and Research , 1998 .

[15]  Maarten Sierhuis,et al.  Accounting for Emotions in Multi-Agent Modeling and Simulation Systems , 2003 .

[16]  Neal M. Ashkanasy,et al.  Current Emotion Research in Organizational Behavior , 2011 .

[17]  Bart Kosko,et al.  Virtual Worlds as Fuzzy Cognitive Maps , 1993, Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments.

[18]  Cynthia D. Fisher,et al.  Affective events - emotions matrix: a classification of work events and associated emotions , 1998 .

[19]  John Yen,et al.  FLAME—Fuzzy Logic Adaptive Model of Emotions , 2000, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.

[20]  Ziad Kobti,et al.  Emotion Enabled Model for Hospital Medication Administration , 2011 .

[21]  Juan Pavón,et al.  An Agent-Based Simulation Tool to Support Work Teams Formation , 2008, DCAI.

[22]  Chris W. Clegg,et al.  Agent-based modelling and simulation: The potential contribution to organizational psychology , 2012 .

[23]  David J. Israel,et al.  Plans and resource‐bounded practical reasoning , 1988, Comput. Intell..