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Emotions have a capacity to impact organizations and their structure. Organizations are emotional places, and they motivate employees to perform and customers to buy. Various events in organizations create emotions and affect an employee’s sense of satisfaction or outrage. We identify with our organizations on how we ‘feel’ about it.
Rules about the display of emotions act as organizing forces within organizations and are used to create organizational structure and shape behavior. In fact a great deal of leadership is actually about emotion management. Proper display and handling of emotions are essential to inspirational leadership.
However, emotions can harm employees, affect how they react to pressures and be the cause of low performance and poor results. Most of our decisions are emotionally based, and we use logic to provide a rational explanation for whatever decision we take. Emotional management skills are therefore necessary for every organization if they wish to develop inspiring leaders and terrific brands.
In a workplace dominated by the emphasis on revenues, speed and paucity of time, the role of emotions in decision-making and effective action has been often neglected. Many managers and leaders become victims of their emotions and regard their moods and emotions as things which just “happen”. Many managers with strong technical skills and low “people skills” get promoted regardless of this deficit. They make poor managers unless they are held accountable for their behavior and unless they are coached to prevent or deal with any emotional viral they produce.
In many places, management expect their employees to manage their emotions in the workplace. They do not want their co-workers to express any type of strong emotion — positive or negative. They encourage their co-workers to manage negative emotions at work by “masking” their emotions. More so, they are even guided to express their Positive emotions in moderation. Employees expect others to hide negative or positive emotions in order to maintain what they call “professionalism.” This type of “masking” behavior can be typically found in customer relation occupations but not as much in the employee-to-employee jobs.
Unfortunately, ‘emotion management’ is not something that is taught at work. As such, to learn what is and is not appropriate, most employees learn to manage their emotions by observing others in the workplace. However, recently, many executive / organizational coaches (trained in the use of psychology based techniques) have been active in developing specialist programs in this arena.
This is an area to watch out for. For leaders who understand the emotions in their worlplace are the ones who are going to be most sought after!
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