Emotions at Work
Anger, jealousy, guilt, shame, happiness, and relief are all feelings that you have probably experienced in organizations. These feelings are all part of your emotions.
Emotions are the complex patterns of feelings toward an object or person. We have all seen how emotions affect workplace attitudes and behaviors. When performing your job, you experience a variety of emotions during the day. You also know that how employees and leaders handle their emotions at work has a tremendous impact on their productivity.32 The more positive emotions we experience while at work, the more we form positive attitudes toward the organization. Positive emotions, such as joy, affection, and happiness, serve many purposes. When employees experience these positive emotions, they tend to think more creatively, seek out new information and experiences, behave more flexibly, have greater confidence in their competencies, and be more persistent.
Positive emotions also help individuals bounce back from adversity and live longer and healthier lives. Individuals who experience positive emotions, especially during stressful times, tend to tolerate pain better, cope with and recover from illness faster, and experience less depression. In contrast, negative emotions, such as anger, disgust, and sadness, tend to narrow an individual’s focus and limit his or her options to seek alternatives. For example, anger tends to lead to a desire to escape, attack, or take revenge, and guilt/shame can result in a person’s desire to withdraw from the situ- ation rather than creatively problem solve. Negative emotions also tend to produce larger, more long-lasting effects than positive emotions. That is, negative emotions tend to stay with individuals longer than positive ones.
The distinction between positive and negative emotions is shown in Figure 3.5.
Negative emotions are incongruent with the goal you are striving to achieve. For example, which of the six emotions are you likely to experience if you fail the final exam for this course, or if you are dismissed from a job? Failing the exam or losing a job is incongruent with the goal of graduating or being perceived as an accom- plished professional. On the other hand, which of the four positive emotions, shown in Figure 3.5, will you likely experience if you graduate with honors or receive a promotion? The emotions experienced in these situations are positive because they are congruent with your goals. Therefore, emotions are goal directed.
Positive emotions have been linked to organizational effectiveness. Leaders who express positive emotions encourage employees to feel positive emotions as well.
When individuals have positive emotions, they are more likely to set high goals, see and fix mistakes, feel more competent, and have greater problem-solving capabilities.
In organizations that recently cut staff, such as AT&T and Hewlett-Packard, those organizations with leaders who displayed positive emotions in such trying times had significantly higher productivity, higher quality, and lower voluntary employee turn- over than those leaders who displayed negative emotions. After the attacks on the Hotel Oberoi and Taj Mahal in Mumbai, India, in November 2008, employees at a local restaurant near the hotels were told by their manager that they could leave to protect their safety. Instead, employees and the store supervisors chose to stay. They literally pulled stunned individuals passing by into the store, giving them food, drink, shelter, and emotional support. As one reporter said: “Embedded in a crisis is an opportunity for employers to build loyalty and wholeheartedly provide positive emotions.”
A Model of Emotions
A model of how emotions affect behavior is shown in Figure 3.6.33 The process starts with a goal. A goal refers to what an individual is trying to accomplish. That is, a goal is your purpose or intent. An eye doctor may have a goal of serving 30 patients a week. Anticipatory emotions refer to the emotions that individuals believe they will feel
Learning Goal 4. Explain how emotions impact employees’ performance.
after achievement of or failure to reach their goal. For example, at Sewell Automotive in Dallas, Texas, a salesperson’s goal is to sell 9 cars a month. If they sell between 9 and 19 cars, they receive special recognition from their manager (e.g., flowers, round of golf, choice of cars to drive for the next month). If they sell more than 20 cars in any month, they receive a special letter from Carl Sewell, a weekend package at a local hotel with all expenses paid, as well as flowers, golf, etc. If they sell fewer than 9 cars a month, they will receive coaching on their selling tactics. If they sell fewer than 27 cars in three months, they are dismissed.
The key motivational device is to have each salesperson imagine the emotions she will feel when she reaches her goal. The more desirable the implications are for achieving the goal, the more intense will be the anticipated emotions from achieving that goal. Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, and other diet organizations ask individuals to write down the emotions they anticipate they will experience when they reach their weight goals. Individuals who anticipated positive emotions (e.g., I will feel excited, delighted, etc.) lost more weight than those who didn’t have such positive anticipatory emotions.
If the anticipatory emotions are of sufficient intensity to motivate the individual, the individual will engage in those behaviors in order to reach his goal. That is, a person will need to develop a plan, outline the behaviors needed to reach his plan, and exert effort to exhibit those behaviors. Returning to our diet example, if individuals can imagine strong positive emotions from achieving their weight goals, they need to behave in ways that will enable them to reach that positive emotion. That is, they need to start exercising and dieting. Both of these behaviors are linked to loss of weight. As shown in Figure 3.6, goal
Love/Affection
Anger Happiness/
Joy
Pride
Relief Disgust
Envy/
Jealousy Sadness Guilt/Shame
Fright/Anxiety
Negative Emotions Positive Emotions
FIGU RE 3. 5 Positive and Negative Emotions
attainment is the next step. Did they reach their goals? Yes or no? If yes, then they would experience positive emotions; if no, then they would experience negative emotions. In our dietary plan, researchers found that those individuals who could anticipate positive emotions from achieving their goal were more likely to diet and exercise and reach their goal than those individuals who didn’t engage in these behaviors.
Cross-Cultural Differences
There are cross-cultural differences in the display of emotions. Most Japanese man- agers believe that it is inappropriate to get emotional doing business, compared with 40 percent of Americans, 34 percent of French managers, and 29 percent of Italians.
Italians, for example, are more likely to accept individuals who display their emotions at work, whereas this would be considered rude in Japan. In the Japanese culture, hiding one’s emotions is considered a virtue because the lack of expression minimizes conflict and avoids drawing attention to the individual. Tomoko Yoshida is a customer relations training expert who works at the Sheraton Hotels in Japan. He teaches hotel employees never to show emotions while talking with a guest. In particular, even if the employee is upset, they are instructed never to point with a finger. Pointing is consid- ered rude. Using one’s whole hand shows more effort and is considered more polite and business-like. Similarly, if a customer is sitting in a restaurant and the waiter raises his or her voice, it signals to the customer that the waiter wants the guest to leave and isn’t welcome any longer. Yoshida also instructs bellmen not to use their feet to close a door or move a customer’s bags or toys even if the bellman is upset. Why? In Japan, individuals believe that the ground is where they walk in shoes. When they go home, they take their shoes off because they don’t want to mix the outside ground with the inside ground. So not using their shoes to move bags—and possibly mixing inside and outside ground—is a sign of respect Yoshida would like the bellmen to exhibit.
Yoshikihiko Kadokawa, author of The Power of Laughing Face, found that even in Japan’s culture, the friendliest clerks in some of Japan’s biggest retail stores consis- tently rang up the highest sales. His research found that smiling salesclerks reported 20 percent more sales than nonsmiling salesclerks. McDonald’s Corporation is using Kadokawa’s techniques in Japan to screen applicants. The company screens out indi- viduals who are too poker faced. When asked by the company to describe a pleasant experience, those applicants who don’t smile and indicate that they find pleasure in what they’re discussing aren’t hired. McDonald’s wants all of their employees to pro- vide the friendly service at the price stated on its menu: “Smiles, 0 yen.”34
Insights for Leaders
Let’s consider six ways by which leaders can create positive emotions in their organization:
Express positive emotions—gratitude, generosity, optimism, trust—regularly at
•
work. Start meetings with sincere words of appreciation. Remember that posi- tive emotions are contagious, especially when expressed by direct supervisors and organizational leaders.
Goal Anticipatory
emotions Behaviors Goal
attainment
Outcome emotions FIGU RE 3. 6 Role of Emotions in Performance
A rule of thumb is that the number of positive communications sent by the leader
•
should outnumber the number of negative communications by a ratio of 5:1 if the employee is to have positive emotions at work.
Give unexpected kindness and reach out to others when it is least expected. When
•
the leader engages in positive emotions and behaviors when it goes against the norm, the element of surprise and courage becomes a powerful example to others, both strengthening individuals’ trust in their leader and role-modeling behavior for others to follow.
Help individuals find positive meaning in their day-to-day work lives. The leader
•
should assist employees with seeing how their work contributes to a greater good and whom they are helping through their efforts.
Provide opportunities for employees to help each other and to express apprecia-
•
tion for the help they receive from others.
Celebrate small wins with employees so that they experience ongoing success and
•
the associated positive emotions.
Personality is a person’s set of relatively stable characteristics and traits that account for consistent patterns of behavior in various situations. Each individual is like other individuals in some ways and in some ways is unique. An individual’s personality is determined by inherited genes and the environment. Experiences occur within the framework of the individual’s biological, physical, and social environment—all of which are modified by the culture, family, and other groups to which the per- son belongs. We reviewed five basic cultural values—individualism and collectiv- ism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, gender role orientation, and long-term orientation—that impact the development of a person’s personality.
An individual’s personality may be described by a set of factors known as the Big Five personality factors. Specifically, these personality factors describe an individual’s degree of emotional stability, agreeableness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and open- ness. We hope that you took the opportunity to assess your own Big Five personality dimensions in Table 3.1. Many specific personality dimensions, including self-esteem, locus of control, and emotional intelligence, have important relationships to work behavior and outcomes. In addition, an understanding of interactions between the person and the situation is important for comprehending organizational behavior.
Attitudes are patterns of feelings, beliefs, and behavioral tendencies directed toward specific individuals, groups, ideas, issues, or objects. Attitudes have affective (feelings, emotions), cognitive (beliefs, knowledge), and behavioral (a predisposition to act in a particular way) components. The relationship between attitudes and behavior isn’t always clear, although important relationships exist. We reviewed how the attitudes of hope, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment affect behavior in many organizations.
Employees show a variety of emotions during the day. Some of these are positive and can lead to more effective performance, whereas others are negative and can lead to poor performance. We introduced how emotions can influence the productivity of employees.
1. Explain the basic sources of personality formation.
2. Identify a set of personality dimensions that affect performance.
3. Describe the attitudes that affect performance.
4. Explain how emotions impact employees’
performance.
Chapter Summary
Key Terms and Concepts
Agreeableness, 79
Anticipatory emotions, 93 Attitudes, 85
Collectivism, 73 Conscientiousness, 80 Emotional intelligence, 83 Emotional stability, 79 Emotions, 93
External locus of control, 82 Extraversion, 80
Gender role orientation, 74 Goal, 93
Hope, 87
Individual differences, 70 Individualism, 73
Internal locus of control, 82
Job satisfaction, 88 Locus of control, 82 Long-term orientation, 74 Openness, 80
Organizational commitment, 91 Personality, 70
Personality trait, 77 Power distance, 73 Reliability, 80 Self-awareness, 83 Self-esteem, 81 Self-motivation, 84 Social empathy, 83 Social skills, 84
Uncertainty avoidance, 74 Validity, 80
Discussion Questions
1. Visit Apple’s website (www.apple.com) and enter “Steve Jobs” in the search icon. Then click on the feature showing him deliver a speech. How does this speech illustrate the factors in the Big Five personality profile?
2. Atlas Sports Genetics (www.atlasgene.com.) offers to test parents to determine whether their children have inherited the genes to be a successful football player, marathon runner, etc. What are some ethical issues raised by doing this?
3. How might the values of a culture impact the devel- opment of a person’s personality? What cultural dimensions seem to have the most influence on this developmental process?
4. What influences on personality development seem most important to you? Why?
5. Using the Big Five personality factors, describe the per- sonality of (a) a close family member and (b) a person
for whom you have worked. How do these factors affect your behavior toward them?
6. Can individuals change their attitude without changing their behavior? Give an example.
7. Describe how you can develop your hope attitude to improve your performance.
8. Don Tuttle, CEO of Top Gun Ventures, thinks that satisfied workers are more productive than less satis- fied workers. Do you agree or disagree with him?
Explain.
9. Think of an organization that you have worked for.
What factors seemed to influence your commitment to this organization?
10. In what ways does the model of emotions affect your attitude and performance?