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Managing employee moods & emotions: lessons from event management

04/10/2026

3 min

Festivals. Industry events. Fashion shows. These are just some examples of time-sensitive settings, where event managers must find creative solutions fast, amid considerably high stakes. Unsurprisingly therefore, these are also highly emotional settings, full of energy and excitement, but also tensions, doubts and anger. In this video, Professor Maja KORICA presents some of the results of her recent *work which has looked at how managers create conditions for different temporary teams to work together effectively.

To do this, Professor KORICA from IÉSEG and her co-author Yoann BAZIN, observed the backstages of fashion shows in Paris over several years, specifically the on-site technical teams trying to build complex runways in a short space of time.

Managers orchestrate moods and emotions

“What we found is managerial mood work: in other words, managers’ purposely orchestrate the teams’ mood and emotions to ensure the collective creative task gets accomplished,” she explains.

Specifically, on-site stage managers triggered coordination of the event by moving the group to an activated unpleasant mood, where staff were engaged, but clearly unhappy with current progress. They then kept collective attention to the task by encouraging staff to speed up or slow down as needed with certain tasks

Finally, they temporarily resolved collective work by ensuring everyone felt confident in what they created, even if privately the managers themselves retained doubts.

Key managerial takeaways

Professor KORICA explains that there are two key takeaways for managers: “Firstly, being attentive to the mood of your staff is not ‘fluff’; it can be incredibly important.”

Therefore, adapting to teams’ moods and learning how to productively prompt them in certain directions is key to effective management.

“Secondly, anger can be productive in certain cases. This does not justify yelling and screaming indiscriminately.”

“What our research shows instead is anger is particularly productive in triggering collective work, but far less in later stages of coordination. Anger is also far less effective in more long-term situations.”

This means managers should carefully consider when anger can help move collective work forward; and when it is likely to spectacularly backfire. “With great mood making power should come great managerial responsibility,” concludes Professor KORICA.

*The full study is available here:

Korica, M. and Bazin, Y.(Université Paris Nanterre) (2025), Managerial Mood Work: Generating Coordination in Creative, Time-Pressured Settings. Br. J. Manag., 36: 1674-1693.