لطفا منتظر باشید ...
Do Emotions in the Workplace Matter?
Scientists have learned a lot about the role of emotions in the workplace by conducting thousands of research studies. Some of the results of these studies may surprise you. For instance, how managers feel is a useful indicator and predictor of organizational performance.[4] In fact, research by Sigal Barsade, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, demonstrates that how a management team feels has a direct impact on a company’s earnings. She discovered that a top management team that shares a common, emotional outlook that is positive will have 4 to 6 percent higher market-adjusted earnings per share than companies whose management team consists of members with diverse emotional outlooks.[5] In a nine-week-long research study by University of Queensland’s Peter Jordan and Neil Ashkanasy, teams consisting of members low in emotional intelligence ended up at the same level as did teams of people with high EI.[6] At first blush, these results are not something that the high-EI manager might expect. What is striking is the difference in performance during the first weeks of the study. The high-EI teams were able to get their act in gear a whole lot faster than the low-EI teams. Eventually, the low-EI teams did catch up to their more emotionally intelligent peers. The lesson learned from this study is that team emotional intelligence doesn’t much matter—as long as you don’t mind weeks of lost team productivity and hundreds of worker hours wasted.Emotions at a team level have a powerful impact in other ways as well. You might call it team spirit or morale, but all of us have experienced how the mood of a group can change. And how we feel does seem to influence our performance.[7] Sometimes it happens slowly and subtly, but sometimes you can almost feel a chill come over the group; at other times, a sense of excitement permeates the air. The spread of emotions from person to person is a phenomenon known as emotional contagion.
Emotional contagion has powerful effects on a group. Consider the experiment in which several groups of people were asked to simulate an end-of-the-year bonus pool discussion.[8] Their role was to get as large a bonus for their employees as possible, while still attempting to make the best decisions for the organization as a whole. One of the people in the group, unbeknownst to the discussants, was a trained actor who behaved in a negative manner with some of the groups and in a positive manner with the other groups. Videos of the groups made it clear that the actor had an impact on the groups’ mood, depressing it in the negative condition and enhancing it in the positive condition. The research participants also reported changes in their mood, but they did not seem to realize why their mood had changed. Even more important, the positive groups showed a lot less conflict and much more cooperation than did their negative-mood counterparts. But emotional contagion, on its own, is neither intelligent nor unintelligent. The strategic application of emotional contagion is what makes it part of the repertoire of the emotionally intelligent manager. How leaders feel also affects how, and how well, they influence people, which, after all, is the core of leadership. A leader who is feeling sad is more likely to generate arguments that are persuasive and well thought out. Sad moods, in general, help people think in a more bottom-up, systematic manner than do happy moods. The same leader, feeling somewhat happy, will probably generate creative and original arguments in a bid to influence others. This leader will also come up with a whole lot more arguments when feeling happy than when feeling sad. And in general, emotions at work influence judgment, job satisfaction, helping behavior, creative problem solving, and decision making.[9]
What makes all of this either smart or dumb is whether you realize the role that emotions play and what you do with that knowledge. Do you try to get your team to generate creative messages when they are down in the dumps? Or do you use this time instead to critically evaluate and edit a prospectus? The emotionally intelligent manager matches the mood to the moment. We don’t expect most managers to know how to do this. You might have taken courses in accounting and marketing, but we’ll bet that you never took a course on emotion management strategies, emotional identification skills, or emotion generation. So consider this book your course on emotions at work—why they matter, how they operate, and how to leverage the power of your emotions to be a better manager and leader. Your emotional education starts with the six basic principles of emotional intelligence, which we discuss next. [4]Staw, B. M., and Barsade S. G. “Affect and Managerial Performance: A Test of the Sadder-But-Wiser Vs. Happier-And-Smarter Hypotheses.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1993, 38, 304–328. Also see Staw, B. M., Sutton, R. I., and Pelled, L. H. “Employee Positive Emotion and Favorable Outcomes at the Workplace.” Organizational Science, 1994, 5, 51–71. [5]Barsade, S. G., Ward, A. J., Turner, J.D.F., and Sonnenfeld, J. A. “To Your Heart’s Content: The Influence of Affective Diversity in Top Management Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 2000, 45, 802–836. [6]Jordan, P. J., Ashkanasy, N. M., H‰rtel, C.E.J., and Hooper, G. S. “Workgroup Emotional Intelligence: Scale Development and Relationship to Team Process Effectiveness and Goal Focus.” Human Resource Management Review, 2002, 12, 195–214. [7]Totterdell, P. “Catching Moods and Hitting Runs: Mood Linkage and Subjective Performance in Professional Sports Teams.” Journal of Applied Psychology, 2000, 85, 848–859; Totterdell, P., Kellet, S., Teuchmann, K., and Briner, R. B. “Evidence of Mood Linkage in Work Groups.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1998, 74, 1504–1515. [8]Barsade, S. G. “The Ripple Effect: Emotional Contagion and Its Influence on Group Behavior.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 2002, 47, 644–675. [9]See, for example, Brief, A. P., and Weiss, H. M. “Organizational Behavior: Affect in the Workplace.” Annual Review of Psychology, 2002, 53, 270–307; Weiss, H. M., and Cropanzano, R. “Affective Events Theory: A Theoretical Discussion of the Structure, Causes and Consequences of Affective Experiences at Work.” In B. M. Staw and L. L. Cummings (eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1996; Ashforth, B. E., and Humphrey, R. H. “Emotion in the Workplace: A Reappraisal.” Human Relations, 1995 48, 97–125; George, J. M. “Emotions and Leadership: The Role of Emotional Intelligence.” Human Relations, 2000, 53, 1027–1055; Fisher, C. D., and Ashkanasy, N. M. “The Emerging Role of Emotions in Working Life: An Introduction.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2000, 21, 123–129; Ashkanasy, N. M., and Daus, S. D. “ Emotion in the Workplace: The New Challenge For Managers. Academy of Management Executive, 2002, 16, 23–45.
