Bounded emotionality is a communications studies approach to dealing with emotional control in the workplace. Emotional control simply refers to how employers and employees handle the range of emotions that naturally occur in the workplace. These emotions can occur because of work, or they can be brought into work from an employee's home life. Bounded emotionality was proposed by Dennis K. Mumby and Linda Putnam.

Mumby and Putnam (1992) stress that bounded emotionality encourages the expression of a wide range of emotions. Their theory encourages expression of emotions because it is a way to maintain interpersonal relationships and boundaries among people in the organization. Additionally, the expression of emotions strengthens work relations because people bond over mutual feelings. Bounded emotionality is a broad framework for organizations to use when dealing with emotions. It has six defining characteristics. The characteristics are: intersubjective limitations, spontaneously emergent work feelings, tolerance of ambiguity, heterarchy of values, integrated self identity and authenticity, and community.

Prior to Mumby and Putnam's specific articulation of bounded emotionality research and the role it plays in what is known about organizational emotion regulation, workplace emotion research focused on the relationship between emotion regulation, work performance and general attitudes towards work. Traditionally, two concepts, bounded rationality and emotional labor, were used to describe conventional organizational theory pertaining to emotional regulation.

Whereas bounded emotionality encourages the expression of a large spectrum of emotions in organizational communication, bounded rationality advocates for the "control" or tempering of any emotion or personal characteristics that may interfere with rational organizational decision making. Simon introduced the term bounded rationality and cast it as "bounded" because he viewed highly emotion-based forms of reasoning such as intuition and judgement as irrational and thus unhelpful in reaching organizational goals. Bounded rationality approaches to emotional regulation not only devalue individual emotion in the workplace but also view excessive emotional expression as inappropriate for the work setting.

Emotional labor refers to the way in which individuals manage emotions based on what is perceived as "appropriate" in specific social or environmental situations. Human beings often pay close attention to their surroundings and how they should act in certain social situations. A variety of organizational factors as well as personal factors may impact emotional regulation including: socialization, channels of communication, departmental differences (e.g. sales vs. packaging), etc. In an organization that deploys a bounded emotionality approach to emotional regulation, much less emotional labor will be required than an organization that deploys a bounded rationality approach.

Mumby and Putnam introduced the concept of bounded emotionality as an alternative organizational concept to bounded rationality and emotional labor in order to demonstrate the instability of traditional understandings and highlight what they believe to be the importance of emotions in organizational decision-making. In an organization framed by bounded emotionality (as opposed to bounded rationality and emotional labor), hierarchical goals and values are flexible as emotion and the physical self are not isolated from the process of organizing. In other words, emotions are "bounded" in organizations to protect interpersonal relationships and mutual understandings, two organizational aspects that Mumby and Putnam argue as important to success.

Unbounded emotionality should be enacted not for the instrumental gain of the organization, but to enhance the well-being of the individual organizational members. Work stress is a political, organizational and community issue that can be difficult to implement in large organizations.

Bounded emotionality is a limited, pragmatic approach to the problem of emotional control in organizations. It focuses on work related emotions, defined as, "feelings, sensations, and affective responses to organizational sensations". However, it is acknowledged that such work feelings stem from and affect emotions that come from one's personal life.