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Introduction
THE EMOTIONAL ORGANIZATION
There are some bland portraits of organizations. They show organizational charts (boxes linked in hierarchical or mosaic form), formal job descriptions, lists of competencies and objectives, mission statements, inputs and outputs, production flow diagrams and measurement procedures applied to just about anything that is measurable. Over the years, organizational and management theorists have gone some way towards bringing people and life into such stiff images. But the kind of individuals they portray are also, typically, boxed and measured. They are human ‘resources’ or human ‘capital’, or ‘variables’, there to serve the bigger, ‘more important’, entities – the firm, the industry, production, profit.
The emotional organization overturns this picture. It does two things. First, it places people at the very centre of organization – they constitute the organization, what it is and what it can achieve. Second, it reveals emotion as the prime medium through which people act and interact. Organizational procedures and processes are shaped, negotiated, rejected, reformed, fought over or celebrated, because of feelings. Careers blossom or crash through feelings. Offices and departments grow, compete and change around the feelings that frame preferences, politics and ambitions. Who works hard, seems not to care, or rarely takes the initiative, is based on emotion. Organizations change or stagnate because of the emotions that energize or freeze people. All organizations are emotional arenas where feelings shape events, and events shape feelings.
When we enter the workplace we bring our loves, hates, anxieties, envies, excitement, disappointments and pride. We will meet and mix with others who have their own cares and concerns, their own emotional agendas. These are core influences on who we can collaborate with, how comfortable we feel, who we trust, how energized we become, what we can reveal and what we hide. They underpin, consciously or unconsciously, the coalitions, conflicts and negotiations that emerge. All this, in effect, makes ‘the job’ – what we do, what we produce, how we perform. Emotions are not an optional extra, or incidental to ‘real’ work. They are part of the warp and weft of work experiences and practices.
It is rare to hear people talk about their work as if it is a feeling-free zone. Confessions soon unroll the loves, disappointments, frustrations, envies and joys, such as in the following accounts:
My career developed from general management to consultancy to Directorship of a multinational oil company. I was Managing Director for 5 years. Success stories, high politics and intrigue. It was enormous fun which landed me fantastic bonuses as profits soared. I made the company a market leader. But the team spirit was broken up with the fragmentation of the company. Success breeds jealousy. (Managing Director of Oil Company)1
Building a business can be boring. Heresy? Ask anyone who has been at the top of a company for more than a few years. The daily grind of business consists largely of taking care of thousands of tiny, laborious, details. Very little of what a company does ever sees the light of day, much less the camera lights of press conferences, photo shoots, or commercials. (Bill Marriott, Chief Executive of Marriott Hotels)2
It’s a relief when you get off the moving line. It’s such a tremendous relief. I can’t put it into words. When you’re on the line it’s on top of you all the time. You may feel ill, not one hundred percent, but that line will be one hundred percent. Being on sub-assembly is like getting off the roundabout. Y’know … day in, day out.… Never stopping. I still have nightmares about it. I couldn’t go back on the line. Not for anything. (Ford Assembly-Line Worker)3
Inside such accounts are hints about what organizations and managerial practices can do to people emotionally. They can generate fun, pride and exhilaration. They can also make us bored, stressed, anxious and depressed. Our work organizations regulate our feelings – what we are able to express or display. Our emotions are fashioned by powerful social scripts where showing what you ‘really’ feel can sometimes be risky. It is often appearances that count. Familiar examples are management’s desire for a cheery sales-force; the studied seriousness of the physician or lawyer; the sergeant’s overblown anger in front of his platoon. When an organization gets a tight grip on what we can and cannot emotionally show or be, is this is a healthy state of affairs? What kind of control should an organization have over our emotions? Are some sectors of our economy becoming lifeless, with their robotized McDonald’s or Disney smile?
For most of the time our work experiences are not saturated with the ‘big’, emotions, such as rage, anger or euphoria. Emotions are just ‘there’, mundane, barely discernible. Like much of life, being part of an organization is often dominated by everyday routines, such as ritualistic greetings to colleagues, corridor chats, lunchtime habits, periodic checking of e-mail, visiting the washroom, answering predicable phone requests, attending regular meetings and keeping things in their place. Such workaday episodes are, nevertheless, always brushed with feelings, however slight. They inject meaning into our working moments – positive, negative, mixed, conflicting or ambivalent. There is the ebb and flow of boredom, demoralization, self-consciousness, daydreaming, frustration, fun time, exhaustion, anxiety, attraction, play and absorption. Our emotionalities do not simply switch off; they tick over, quietly signalling how things are and how we are doing – and what we want to do next.
THE PURPOSE OF THIS BOOK – AND WHO SHOULD READ IT
My aim in this book is to offer students of organizations and management an engaging, critical introduction to emotions in work life. What do organizational phenomena look like through an emotion lens and how might they be understood?
Emotion in organizations is a fascinating area to explore. Indeed, in recent years it has captured the imagination of a remarkable range of thinkers and scientists, from psychologists, sociologists and management theorists, to neuroscientists, biologists, philosophers, anthropologists and historians. In this book I have distilled some of their work. I have tried to bring to life the experiences of workplace emotion and, where appropriate, suggested implications, or questions, for the design or decision processes of an organization.
HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED
Chapter 2, Where does emotion come from?, tells the story, or more accurately the stories, of emotion in organizations. How can we understand emotional processes in organizations? What core perspectives mark the way, and what are the most productive insights? Is emotion biologically fixed? What is the role of early experiences? How is emotion socially shaped? These ideas will crop up in different ways in the chapters to come.
The rest of the book is then divided into two parts: Organizing with emotion and Emotional injuries.
Part I: organizing with emotion
Part I focuses on some key areas where emotion is directly used, or heavily implicated, in everyday workplace operations or management. It reveals the ways in which emotion is openly harnessed for profit and gain. It shows how emotion can make or break leadership, decision processes and different forms of organizational innovation or change.
Chapter 3, Recruiting emotion, explores the way displayed emotions have become appropriated and manipulated by employers. How is it done? What are the costs, benefits and consequences of making emotion a key product in commercial and professional transactions?
Chapter 4, Being emotionally intelligent, takes a critical look at the recent explosion of interest in emotional intelligence. Is emotional intelligence something that unlocks the potential for more effective, and more fulfilling, relationships at work? How cautious should we be about its claims?
Chapter 5, Virtually emotion, investigates our seduction with new information technologies at work: virtual organizations, computer-mediated work relationships, telecommuting. What happens to our emotions and personal relationships when virtuality penetrates our work lives? Do we end up emotionally impoverished, eyes fixed on screens instead of faces? Or does virtuality transform and enhance our ways of being and feeling?
Chapter 6, Leading and following – with emotion, examines leadership – as, quintessentially, an emotional process. Some leaders are skilled emotion managers. They ‘move’ their followers and their followers place their faith in them. The bond, and its tensions, is a curious one, where fear, love and anxiety can all work together. It is also fragile. The charismatic leader can suddenly lose his or her charm. In turning an emotion spotlight on leadership and ‘followership’, what new insights emerge for our understanding and practice?
Chapter 7, Emotion and decisions, focuses on decision making. Dispassionate decision making is taken as the hallmark of an effective manager. Through an emotion lens, however, decision making looks limp without emotions. We need emotions to make decisions, especially ethically sound ones. We often make important decisions for emotional reasons, and our moods and emotions – felt and displayed – are deeply implicated in how and what we negotiate. Emotions bind us to certain decisions, as well as blind us to some of their consequences.
Chapter 8, Emotion and change, observes organizational change through an emotion lens. Change often involves loss and anxiety. It can also be exciting: the promise of a better future. People often want change, but they are also fearful of it because it represents uncertainty, especially when imposed. Resistance is a common reaction. Some organizational changes try to manipulate group emotion. What are the ethical implications of this?
Part II: emotional injuries
For many people, work offers excitement, challenge and, periodically, joy. But it would misleading (albeit comforting) to present emotion in organizations exclusively in these terms. For every happy moment, there are unhappy ones. Indeed, we tend to talk, ruminate on and take home the emotional distress of work more than the fun moments. When these feelings are persistent and severe they expose the darker side of work – its pains, stresses and violence. This part of the book examines the essence of such injuries and the implications of seeing organizations from such a standpoint.
Chapter 9, Stress as emotion and fashion, looks at how stress at work has become a popular ‘disease’ and emotional ‘problem’. What is stress and can it be avoided? What makes stressful feelings stressful? Why is it that some people cannot admit their work stresses, while others talk about stress openly and willingly? Should we look for roots of stress in the individual, the job, the management, the wider social conditions, or all of these?
Chapter 10 is about Bullying and violence at work. Such practices prey on fear, insecurity and humiliation. Who bullies and why? Who gets bullied? How do certain organizational cultures produce bullies, even celebrate them? There are workgroups, and even whole institutions, that can be violent. Why? What can be done?
Chapter 11 investigates Sexual harassment. Sexual harassment is a particularly pernicious form of violence, involving power and powerlessness. It can create considerable distress for the victim at, and away from, work. The perpetrators are usually, but not always, men – often individually, sometimes in groups. The norms of appropriate sexual conduct at work are neither fixed nor universal, so the boundaries of acceptable sexual conduct can sometime be unclear, and are certainly seen differently by victim and harasser. What are the deeper social and psychological roots of sexual hara...
