Not Your Garden (Hose) Variety Emotion: An Integrative Review of the Flows of Anger and a Path Forward

Our integrative review of anger in organizational life uncovered four organizing dimensions to understanding and productively managing the life cycle of anger: roles in an anger episode (i.e., angry person, target, and observer), phases of an episode (i.e., stimulus, experience, and response), time (i.e., within and beyond the episode), and level of control. Although much existing work has focused on freeze frames of specific aspects of anger, integrating these dimensions spurred development of the intensity-direction framework, which encapsulates two unifying underlying themes: the intensity (which can be amplified or dampened) and direction (which can be focused or redirected) of anger. Much like the flow of water through a garden hose, scholarship on anger needs to understand when, where, why, and how the intensity and direction of the flow of anger varies. Based on this integrative framework, we identify directions for future research that are ripe for continued exploration.