Making Sense of Being Mixed: Work-Related Effects of Attitudinal and Emotional Ambivalence

Ambivalence – the simultaneous experience of positive and negative emotions and/or cognitions towards a given target – is generally considered costly for employees. However, scholarship disagrees as to whether that premise holds. Research on attitudinal and emotional ambivalence is siloed in distinct literatures that call on different theoretical foundations and reveal discrepant effects of ambivalence. Attitudinal ambivalence scholars generally argue that it is undesirable, prompting biased information processing, behavioral hesitation, and withdrawal. Emotional ambivalence scholars instead argue that ambivalence is desirable, enhancing cognitive flexibility and judgment accuracy. To achieve greater construct clarity on attitudinal versus emotional ambivalence and reconcile prevailing views, we developed an integrative framework and used it to guide meta-analytic tests of 108 papers, 186 studies, and 355 effect sizes. Results revealed that attitudinal and emotional ambivalence are overlapping constructs, and both are associated with subjective feelings of internal conflict. Findings also showed that both forms of ambivalence similarly curtail action but enhance learning. Finally, results demonstrated that a closure imperative – a contextual moderator capturing a requirement to decide, judge, or estimate – weakened the relationships of attitudinal and emotional ambivalence with learning. Our findings offer suggestions for how ambivalence can reduce biased thinking in organizations.