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Sigal BarsadeOlivia A. O Neill
January 06, 2016
Managers tend to view emotions as something soft that can t really be
measured. But you can and should track emotions quantitatively, the same
way you d track employees other attitudes and behaviors: through surveys.
There s a key difference in approach, however.
In a survey we ve used in many organizational settings, people don t tell us
how they feel. Rather, employees or outside raters observe the emotional
culture around them that is, the norms, values, artifacts, and assumptions
governing which feelings people can have and should express at work. This helps
us get a birds-eye view of what s happening with the group as a whole. We ask:
To what degree do other people in this organization (or division or unit)
display the following emotions? The options include enthusiasm, caring,
compassion, frustration, anxiety, and energy, to name a few. We then ask which
emotions people should or shouldn t express in their organization.
We also measure how the basic emotions anger, companionate love, fear, joy,
and sadness intersect with one another. That s because our research over the
past decade shows that groups can have multiple emotional cultures at the same
time. For example, in a metropolitan hospital we studied, we found that a
strong culture of companionate love within certain units served as a buffer for
an equally strong culture of anxiety. Managers are also likely to find
different emotional subcultures throughout their organizations. Once they gauge
which cultures are prevalent, they can determine which ones they must focus on
the most to meet their strategic goals. For example, when we analyzed
emotional-culture survey data at Cisco Finance, we found that fostering joy was
a high priority because of its impact on employee commitment and satisfaction.
As a result, management has doubled down on initiatives that promote fun at
work. At other companies, reducing anger or fear matters more than increasing
joy. Needs vary widely by context.
Of course, employee surveys aren t the only way to track emotional culture. We
have used interviews and on-site observations as well. A culture interview
usually starts with questions about the job ( What is the biggest challenge of
working at your company? ), followed by questions about what it takes for
employees to do well in the organization and what can derail them (a good
shortcut for understanding culture), and then more-direct questions about
culture ( What words would you use to describe the culture or personality of
your unit? ). Because it s important to capture both highly salient and hidden
aspects of emotional culture, we also look for spontaneous, nonverbal cues
such as facial expressions, posture, gestures, and vocal tone. We ve even
analyzed office d cor, rituals, and routines. In our research and practice,
such indicators have correlated closely with the survey data, which helps
confirm accuracy all around.
You may be wondering: At what level should you measure emotional culture? Your
immediate work group, division, or function? Or the organization as a whole?
That decision depends on a host of contextual factors, such as where your
strategic priorities lie and where you re seeing performance problems. No
matter what level you choose to focus on, it s critical to keep tracking
emotional culture over time once you ve determined what it is and what it needs
to be. Cisco Finance now measures its emotional culture yearly, which allows
senior managers to gauge how well their culture change initiatives are working.
Once you ve measured your group s emotional culture, remember that your
behavior as a leader is one of your most effective tools for changing it. When
we hear that a group has low morale, the first question we ask is: What kind of
emotional expression and attitude is the manager or leader coming in with each
day? A leader s attitude has an enormous effect, so it, too, needs to be
measured and managed perhaps above all else.
Sigal Barsade is the Joseph Frank Bernstein Professor of Management at Wharton.
Olivia A. O Neill is an assistant professor of management at George Mason
University and a senior scholar at the school s Center for the Advancement of
Well-Being.