Anger and Laughter as Currency: When Emotions Acquire Value, How Do Organizations Evolve or Collapse?

This study theoretically examines the possibility that emotions within organizations function not merely as individual psychological states, but as currencies that possess value. In conventional organizational research, emotions such as anger and laughter have been treated primarily as individual traits or as auxiliary factors in communication. In contrast, this study rejects the reduction of emotions to individual internal states and instead focuses on the structural conditions under which emotions are positioned as resources that are exchangeable for value within organizations. Drawing on cultural evolutionary theory and evolutionary organizational theory, this paper first organizes the premise that emotions are imitated and reproduced as memes, while organizational structures function as environments that exert selection pressure on them. Based on this premise, the study defines the state in which emotions are exchanged for influence, legitimacy, and survivability within organizations as the monetization of emotion, and proposes an emotional currency model. The paper then analyzes two organizational types: those in which anger functions as currency and those in which laughter functions as currency. In anger-currency organizations, the expression of anger short-circuits decision-making and acquires high liquidity by eliciting silence and compliance. In contrast, in laughter-currency organizations, laughter enables the continuation of dialogue and the repair of relationships, thereby contributing to the maintenance of organizational adaptability. These differences do not arise from the personalities or ethical orientations of organizational members, but from structural conditions that determine which emotions acquire value. Furthermore, this study clarifies the process by which emotional expressions of superiors are imitated and reproduced as successful models through the Superior–Mimicry Loop, resulting in the fixation of emotional currency as organizational culture. It also demonstrates that transitions from anger-currency organizations to laughter-currency organizations cannot be achieved through moral exhortation or emotional suppression, but only through the reconfiguration of decision-making processes and successful models. This study provides a theoretical framework for reinterpreting phenomena such as power harassment, organizational degeneration, and increased turnover not as individual problems, but as structural outcomes generated by the allocation of emotional currency. By conceptualizing emotions not as entities to be suppressed or promoted, but as elements to be allocated, this study offers a new theoretical foundation for understanding organizational culture and evolution.