Emotions are pervasive in all veins of an organization, and management scholars have published an extensive body of research on feelings at work. Yet there remains a lack of organizational research regarding how the temporal and interpersonal natures of emotions interact with one another. To bridge these disparate streams of research, I integrate extant scholarship on both topics to investigate a phenomenon I term emotional whiplash. Though an intrapersonal experience, emotional whiplash is pertinent to interpersonal interactions, as it may be expressed during interpersonal encounters and can engender important downstream consequences. I thus employ qualitative (Studies 1–2) and quantitative methods (Study 3) to develop and test theory about the sociality of emotional whiplash expressions. In particular, I examine the influence of emotional whiplash expressions on trust between dyadic partners. Across this set of studies, I highlight the role of causal attributions in influencing how observers respond to others’ expressions of emotional whiplash. Through this paper, I introduce a novel type of emotional change and advance our knowledge on interpersonal emotion dynamics, as well as how and why our relationships at work may strengthen or disintegrate over the course of an interaction.
