Your manager's mood: is it a judgement on your work?
A sharp tone or a worried expression can be enough to make an employee question the quality of their work. The useful question is how to take a manager's mood into account without confusing it with a professional judgement.
What the literature establishes
Thomas Sy, Stéphane Côté and Richard Saavedra (2005, Journal of Applied Psychology) demonstrated experimentally that a leader's mood could influence group members' moods and the group's collective affective tone. Their study also examines effects on group processes, including coordination and effort. It establishes emotional influence, not the validity of a manager's mood as an indicator of work quality.
Transmission that goes beyond words
Sigal G. Barsade (2002, Administrative Science Quarterly) experimentally studied emotional contagion in groups completing a managerial decision-making exercise. Emotions expressed by a confederate could spread and influence cooperation, conflict and perceived performance. This mechanism suggests distinguishing how an interaction leaves us feeling from what the manager actually requested or assessed.
The hasty conclusion
One might conclude that the answer is simply to wait until the manager is in a good mood before raising an important issue. These studies do not test that strategy or show that a positive mood guarantees a fairer judgement. The aim is therefore not to monitor the manager's emotional state, but to avoid turning an ambiguous emotional cue into a verdict on one's own competence. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these experiments cannot establish
These experiments concern group interactions in bounded situations, rather than the full course of an ongoing reporting relationship. They cannot identify the specific cause of an irritated tone or determine how each employee should respond. Distinguishing mood from assessment does not mean trivialising humiliating remarks or asking employees to regulate their manager's emotions.
A practical check in Sion
In Sion, within a team working in hydropower, healthcare, viticulture or Alpine tourism, the SHR programme “Building an effective relationship with your manager” can propose a two-week trial. After each interaction experienced as negative, the employee separately records the observable fact, their interpretation and any explicit request, without recording sensitive data; if a judgement about their work remains unclear, they ask: “Is there a specific aspect of my work that needs changing?” The measure is the proportion of these interactions for which the manager explicitly confirms a request for correction. This record checks whether a work-related expectation exists, not the manager's psychological state, and must not delay a safety alert. To go further: explore the Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager training in Sion in the canton of Valais, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Building an Effective Relationship with Your Manager in Sion
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