💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 5770.gmi captured on 2022-06-04 at 00:00:36. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Sigal BarsadeOlivia A. O Neill
From the January February 2016 Issue
Before leaving work each day, employees at Ubiquity Retirement + Savings press
a button in the lobby. They re not punching out not in the traditional sense,
anyway. They re actually registering their emotions. They have five buttons to
choose from: a smiley face if they felt happy at work that day, a frowny face
if they felt sad, and so on.
This may sound like an HR gimmick ( See? Management cares how you feel! ) or an
instrument of forced satisfaction ( The team with the most smiley faces wins!
). But it s neither. Ubiquity is using the data it collects to understand what
motivates employees to learn what makes them feel a sense of belonging and
excitement at work. Other organizations are starting to do the same. Some use
apps that record how much fun people are having. Some hire technology
consultants who specialize in the monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly
tracking of moods. Unfortunately, though, these organizations are in the
minority. Most companies pay little attention to how employees are or should be
feeling. They don t realize how central emotions are to building the right
culture.
When people talk about corporate culture, they re typically referring to
cognitive culture: the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and
assumptions that serve as a guide for the group to thrive. Cognitive culture
sets the tone for how employees think and behave at work for instance, how
customer-focused, innovative, team-oriented, or competitive they are or should
be.
Cognitive culture is undeniably important to an organization s success. But it
s only part of the story. The other critical part is what we call the group s
emotional culture: the shared affective values, norms, artifacts, and
assumptions that govern which emotions people have and express at work and
which ones they are better off suppressing. Though the key distinction here is
thinking versus feeling, the two types of culture are also transmitted
differently: Cognitive culture is often conveyed verbally, whereas emotional
culture tends to be conveyed through nonverbal cues such as body language and
facial expression.
Despite a renaissance of scholarship (dubbed the affective revolution ) on the
ways that emotions shape people s behavior at work, emotional culture is rarely
managed as deliberately as cognitive culture and often it s not managed at all.
Companies suffer as a result. Employees who should be showing compassion (in
health care, for example) become callous and indifferent. Teams that would
benefit from joy and pride instead tolerate a culture of anger. People who lack
a healthy amount of fear (say, in security firms or investment banks) act
recklessly. The effects can be especially damaging during times of upheaval,
such as organizational restructurings and financial downturns.
In our research over the past decade, we have found that emotional culture
influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even hard measures
such as financial performance and absenteeism. Countless empirical studies show
the significant impact of emotions on how people perform on tasks, how engaged
and creative they are, how committed they are to their organizations, and how
they make decisions. Positive emotions are consistently associated with better
performance, quality, and customer service this holds true across roles and
industries and at various organizational levels. On the flip side (with certain
short-term exceptions), negative emotions such as group anger, sadness, fear,
and the like usually lead to negative outcomes, including poor performance and
high turnover.
Every organization has an emotional culture, even if it s one of suppression.
So when managers ignore emotional culture, they re glossing over a vital part
of what makes people and organizations tick. They may understand its importance
in theory but can still shy away from emotions at work. Leaders expect to
influence how people think and behave on the job, but they may feel ill
equipped to understand and actively manage how employees feel and express their
emotions at work. Or they may regard doing so as irrelevant, not part of their
job, or unprofessional.
In our interviews with executives and employees, some people have told us that
their organizations lack emotion altogether. But every organization has an
emotional culture, even if it s one of suppression. By not only allowing
emotions into the workplace, but also understanding and consciously shaping
them, leaders can better motivate their employees. In this article we ll
illustrate some of the ways in which emotional culture manifests at work and
the impact it can have in a range of settings, from health care and emergency
services to finance, consulting, and high tech. Drawing on our findings, we ll
also suggest ways of creating and maintaining an emotional culture that will
help you achieve your company s larger goals.
Delving Beneath the Surface
Some companies have begun to explicitly include emotions in their management
principles. For instance, PepsiCo, Southwest Airlines, Whole Foods Market, The
Container Store, and Zappos all list love or caring among their corporate
values. Similarly, C&S Wholesale Grocers, Camden Property Trust, Cisco Finance,
Ubiquity, and Vail Resorts, along with many start-ups, highlight the importance
of fun to their success.
But to get a comprehensive read on an organization s emotional culture and then
deliberately manage it, you have to make sure that what is codified in mission
statements and on corporate badges is also enacted in the micromoments of
daily organizational life. These consist of small gestures rather than bold
declarations of feeling. For example, little acts of kindness and support can
add up to an emotional culture characterized by caring and compassion.
Facial expressions and body language are equally powerful. If a manager
consistently comes to work looking angry (whether he means to or not), he may
cultivate a culture of anger. This phenomenon is surprisingly common: In one
study, Don Gibson, the dean and a professor of management at Fairfield
University s Dolan School of Business, found that working professionals from
multiple organizations actually felt more comfortable expressing anger than joy
on the job (they reported expressing anger three times as often). You can
imagine the ripple effects.
Office d cor and furnishings, too, may suggest what s expected or appropriate
emotionally. Photos of employees laughing at social events or action figures
perched on cubicle walls can signal a culture of joy. Signs with lists of rules
and consequences for breaking them can reflect a culture of fear. Comfy chairs
and tissues in small conference rooms convey that it s OK to bare your soul or
cry if you need to.
But as Edgar Schein, a professor emeritus at MIT s Sloan School, has shown with
his popular three levels of culture model, the most deeply entrenched
elements of organizational culture are the least visible. Take, for instance,
the deep underlying assumption that pitting employees against one another gets
the best work out of them. That s not the kind of thing managers publicize;
sometimes they re even unaware that they are fostering this dynamic. And yet it
s felt by leaders and employees alike. While it may result in healthy
competition, it s just as likely to create a strong culture of envy, which can
erode trust and undermine employees ability to collaborate.
Emotional Cultures in Action
Nearly 30 years ago the social psychologist Phil Shaver and his colleagues
found that people can reliably distinguish among 135 emotions. But
understanding the most basic ones joy, love, anger, fear, sadness is a good
place to start for any leader trying to manage an emotional culture. Here are a
few examples to illustrate how these emotions can play out in organizations.
A culture of joy.
Let s begin with one that s often clearly articulated and actively reinforced
by management above the surface and easy to spot. Vail Resorts recognizes that
cultivating joy among employees helps customers have fun too, which matters a
lot in the hospitality business. It also gives the organization an edge in
retaining top talent in an extremely competitive industry. Have fun is listed
as a company value and modeled by Vail s CEO, Rob Katz who, for instance, had
ice water dumped on his head during a corporate ALS Ice Bucket Challenge and
then jumped fully clothed into a pool. About 250 executives and other employees
followed his lead.
---
Tracking Emotions
Companies have started using apps like Niko Niko to help individual employees
and teams log their emotional reactions to various activities and make the
connection between their moods and productivity.
---
This playful spirit at the top permeates Vail. Management tactics, special
outings, celebrations, and rewards all support the emotional culture. Resort
managers consistently model joy and prescribe it for their teams. During the
workday they give out pins when they notice employees spontaneously having fun
or helping others enjoy their jobs. Rather than asking people to follow
standardized customer service scripts, they tell everyone to go out there and
have fun. Mark Gasta, the company s chief people officer, says he regularly
sees ski-lift operators dancing, making jokes, doing whatever it takes to have
fun and entertain the guest while ensuring a safe experience on the slopes. On
a day-to-day basis, Vail encourages employees to collaborate, because, as Gasta
points out, leaving people out is not fun. At an annual ceremony, a Have Fun
award goes to whoever led that year s best initiative promoting fun at work.
The resort also fosters off-the-job joy with first tracks (first access to
the ski slopes for employees), adventure trips, and frequent social gatherings.
All this is in service to an emotional culture that makes intuitive sense. (Joy
at a ski resort? Of course.) But now consider an organization where the demand
for joy wasn t immediately visible. When we surveyed employees at Cisco Finance
about their organization s emotional culture, it became clear to management
that fostering joy should be a priority. The survey didn t ask employees how
they felt at work; it asked them what emotions they saw their coworkers
expressing on a regular basis. (By having employees report on colleagues
emotions, researchers could obtain a more objective, bird s-eye view of the
culture.) It turned out that joy was one of the strongest drivers of employee
satisfaction and commitment at the company and more of it was needed to keep up
engagement.
So management made joy an explicit cultural value, calling it Pause for Fun.
This signaled that it was an important outcome to track just like productivity,
creativity, and other elements of performance. Many companies use annual
employee engagement surveys to gauge joy in the abstract, often in the form of
job satisfaction and commitment to the organization. But Cisco Finance measured
it much more specifically and is conducting follow-up surveys to track whether
it is actually increasing. In addition, leaders throughout the organization
support this cultural value with their own behavior for example, by creating
humorous videos that show them pausing for fun.
A culture of companionate love.
Another emotion we ve examined extensively one that s common in life but rarely
mentioned by name in organizations is companionate love. This is the degree of
affection, caring, and compassion that employees feel and express toward one
another.
In a 16-month study of a large long-term-care facility on the East Coast, we
found that workers in units with strong cultures of companionate love had lower
absenteeism, less burnout, and greater teamwork and job satisfaction than their
colleagues in other units. Employees also performed their work better, as
demonstrated by more-satisfied patients, better patient moods, and fewer
unnecessary trips to the emergency room. (Employees whose dispositions were
positive to begin with received an extra performance boost from the culture.)
The families of patients in units with stronger cultures of companionate love
reported higher satisfaction with the facility. These results show a powerful
connection between emotional culture and business performance.
Because this study took place in a health care setting, we wondered whether
companionate love matters only in helping industries. So we surveyed more
than 3,200 employees in 17 organizations spanning seven industries:
biopharmaceutical, engineering, financial services, higher education, public
utilities, real estate, and travel. In organizations where employees felt and
expressed companionate love toward one another, people reported greater job
satisfaction, commitment, and personal accountability for work performance.
Take Censeo, a consulting firm that has deliberately cultivated a culture of
companionate love. Cofounder and CEO Raj Sharma wanted to build a company that
made authentic connections with clients. Along the way, Sharma realized that
this strategy, which increased clients trust and the firm s impact, was also
critical to Censeo s organizational culture.
Now the firm hires people who will help sustain its culture; that means turning
away some really smart people who would destroy it. Censeo also encourages
employees to cultivate genuine relationships by interacting socially both at
and outside work. The message seems to be getting through: When asked to
describe colleagues at the firm, one junior analyst called them my friends.
Employees also hold themselves accountable for treating one another with
compassion. They ll confront colleagues including those above them in the
hierarchy for blatantly disregarding the feelings of others or frequently
blowing up at coworkers.
A culture of fear.
Of course, organizations can be defined by negative emotions as well. In Turn
the Ship Around! the retired Navy captain L. David Marquet describes how a
culture of fear plagued the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear submarine that suffered
under extreme command-and-control leadership before he took over. The crew had
low morale and the worst retention rate in the fleet.
Nuclear submarines must accomplish their missions while maintaining security
and safety, so performance depends in large part on the skill and judgment of
the crew. Marquet argues that the constant fear of being yelled at for making
mistakes, not knowing things, challenging authority, and so on made it harder
for sailors to think well and act quickly. This view is backed by research that
the Berkeley professor emeritus Barry Staw and his colleagues have done on
threat rigidity (the tendency to narrow one s focus under threat) and by
findings on the impact of excessive stress on the prefrontal cortex: It impairs
executive functions such as judgment, memory, and impulse control.
Marquet changed that emotional culture by using classic high involvement
management techniques, such as empowering crew members to make decisions and
not punishing them for every misstep. As a result, they became more confident
and accountable and less inclined to simply wait for permission or directions
from their commanding officer. The transformation paid off. Marquet led the
ship from low-performing to award-winning, and 10 of his top 20 officers later
went on to become submarine captains.
What Happens When Emotions Intersect
Clearly, fear can be toxic, but even positive emotions can have unintended side
effects if given too much sway. In a culture of unmitigated joy, fun might
impede work. In a culture of love, where everyone feels like family, employees
might struggle to have honest conversations about problems. To quote one person
we interviewed, People don t want to talk about conflict because they don t
want to get in the way of the love.
Sometimes organizations avoid those problems because multiple emotions balance
one another out. For example, in a comprehensive study of firefighters
organizational culture (conducted by one of us, Olivia O Neill, and Nancy
Rothbard, a professor at Wharton), two emotions came through quite strongly.
Participants described a culture of joviality, expressed mainly through
elaborate jokes and pranks. (They said their most important rule for hiring
someone new was No stiffs. ) But that coexisted with a culture of companionate
love, which the researchers hadn t expected to see in a typically masculine
profession. The firefighters supported one another emotionally offering words
of encouragement when someone was struggling after a tough call, for example,
or was going through a painful divorce. They also offered nonverbal gestures of
affection, such as a bear hug for someone who was choked up over a personal
issue.
There were reasons for both emotional cultures to be strong: Joviality helped
teams coordinate better on the job, because all the pranks had honed their
understanding of individuals weaknesses (anthropologists would call this an
evolutionary advantage of play). Monitoring and managing those weaknesses is
particularly important in fast-moving, high-stress, or dangerous situations.
And companionate love helped the firefighters heal from the traumatic events
endemic in their jobs.
Like any other emotion, companionate love can lead to varying outcomes,
depending on what it s paired with. For the firefighters, it had a tempering
effect on the joviality and teasing, which if taken to extremes could become
isolating and hurtful.
Another example of how emotions intersect comes from our research with the Cat
lica-Lisbon professor Francesco Sguera. In a study of a major medical center in
the United States, we found that the emotional culture was largely defined by
anxiety and anger. The medical center s punishment-based point system
reinforced the anxiety: If you call in sick, you get a point, an employee
wrote. If you are one minute late for work, you get a point. We often feel
that we are liabilities to the department, as disposable as gauze. The rampant
anxiety led to many negative outcomes, including poor financial performance,
burnout, and low job satisfaction. However, in units where a strong culture of
anxiety was coupled with companionate love, employee performance and attitudes
matched those in units with lower anxiety. The culture of companionate love
essentially served as an antidote to the culture of anxiety. It reduced the
negative impact on the bottom line specifically, on gross profit margin by
offsetting the ill effects on employee attitudes and behavior. Although
employees expressed a lot of anxiety and saw it all around them, knowing that
they were cared for by their colleagues helped them to deal with it.
Creating an Emotional Culture
To cultivate a particular emotional culture, you ll need to get people to feel
the emotions valued by the organization or team or at least to behave as if
they do. Here are three effective methods:
Harness what people already feel.
Some employees will experience the desired emotions quite naturally. This can
happen in isolated moments of compassion or gratitude, for example. When such
feelings arise regularly, that s a sign you re building the culture you want.
If people have them periodically and need help sustaining them, you can try
incorporating some gentle nudges during the workday. You might schedule some
time for meditation, for instance; or provide mindfulness apps on people s work
devices to remind them to simply breathe, relax, or laugh; or create a kudos
board, like the one in an ICU we studied, where people can post kind words
about other employees.
But what can you do about emotions that are toxic to the culture you re
striving for? How can you discourage them when they already exist? Expecting
people to put a lid on those feelings is both ineffective and destructive;
the emotions will just come out later in counterproductive ways. It s important
to listen when employees express their concerns so that they feel they are
being heard. That s not to say you should encourage venting, or just let the
emotions flow with no attempt at solving the root problems. Indeed, research
shows that extended venting can lead to poor outcomes. You re better off
helping employees think about situations in a more constructive way. For
example, loneliness, which can eat away at employee attitudes and performance,
is best addressed through cognitive reappraisal getting people to reexamine
their views of others actions. Considering plausible benign motivations for
their colleagues behavior will make them less likely to fixate on negative
explanations that could send them into a spiral.
Model the emotions you want to cultivate.
A long line of research on emotional contagion shows that people in groups
catch feelings from others through behavioral mimicry and subsequent changes
in brain function. If you regularly walk into a room smiling with high energy,
you re much more likely to create a culture of joy than if you wear a neutral
expression. Your employees will smile back and start to mean it.
But negative feelings, too, spread like wildfire. If you frequently express
frustration, that emotion will infect your team members, and their team
members, and so on throughout the organization. Before you know it, you ll have
created a culture of frustration.
People in groups catch feelings from others.
So consciously model the emotions you want to cultivate in your company. Some
organizations go a step further and explicitly ask employees to spread certain
emotions. Ubiquity Retirement + Savings says, Inspire happiness with
contagious enthusiasm. Own your joy and lend it out. Vail Resorts says, Enjoy
your work and share the contagious spirit.
Get people to fake it till they feel it.
If employees don t experience the desired emotion at a particular moment, they
can still help maintain their organization s emotional culture. That s because
people express emotions both spontaneously and strategically at work. Social
psychology research has long shown that individuals tend to conform to group
norms of emotional expression, imitating others out of a desire to be liked and
accepted. So employees in a strong emotional culture who would not otherwise
feel and express the valued emotion will begin to demonstrate it even if their
initial motivation is to be compliant rather than to internalize the culture.
This benefits the organization, not just the individuals trying to thrive in
it. In early anthropological studies of group rituals, strategic emotional
expression was found to facilitate group cohesion by overpowering individual
feelings and synchronizing interpersonal behavior.
---
Cultural Artifacts
An organization s physical environment can send cues subtle or strong about
which feelings employees do and should express at work. Here are some examples:
1 This coworking space for technology start-ups reflects a culture of joy and
fun. Note the robo-cocktail posters and drones parked on the wall.
2 An intensive care unit at one university hospital has a culture of fear:
Employees must stay silent so as not to disturb critically ill patients.
3 But fear and sadness in the ICU are mitigated by companionate love, reflected
in this kudos board for employees.
---
So maintaining the appropriate culture sometimes entails disregarding what you
are truly feeling. Through surface acting, employees can display the valued
emotion without even wanting to feel it. Surface acting isn t a long-term
solution, though. Research shows that it can eventually lead to burnout
particularly in the absence of any outlet for authentic emotions.
A better way to cultivate a desired emotion is through deep acting. With this
technique, people make a focused effort to feel a certain way, and then
suddenly they do. Imagine that an employee at an accounting firm has a family
emergency and requests a week off work at the height of tax audit season.
Although his boss s first thought is No not now no! she could engage in deep
acting to change her immediate feelings of justifiable panic into genuine
caring and concern for her subordinate. By trying hard to empathize, saying Of
course you should go be with your family! and using the same facial
expressions, body language, and tone of voice she would use when actually
feeling those emotions, she could coax herself into the real thing. She would
also be modeling a desired behavior for the subordinate and the rest of the
team.
Fortunately, all these ways of creating an emotional culture whether they
involve really feeling the emotion or simply acting that way can reinforce one
another and strengthen the culture s norms. People don t have to put on an act
forever. Those who begin by expressing an emotion out of a desire to conform
will start to actually feel it through emotional contagion. They ll also
receive positive reinforcement for following the norms, which will make them
more likely to demonstrate the emotion again.
Of course, the culture will be much stronger and more likely to endure if
people truly believe in the values and assumptions behind it. Someone who is
uncomfortable with an organization s emotional culture and has to keep
pretending in order to be successful would probably be better off moving to a
different work environment. Companies often have more than one emotional
culture, so another unit or department might be a good fit. But if the culture
is homogeneous, the employee may want to leave the company entirely.
Implementation Matters at All Levels
Just like other aspects of organizational culture, emotional culture should be
supported at all levels of the organization. The role of top management is to
drive it.
Leaders are often insufficiently aware of how much influence they have in
creating an emotional culture. Traci Fenton is the founder and CEO of WorldBlu,
a consulting firm that tackles fear at work. She shares this example: At one
Fortune 500 company, unbeknownst to the CEO, senior employees regularly use
text message codes to describe his nonverbal expressions of anger in meetings.
RED means he is getting red in the face. VEIN means his veins are popping
out. ACP, which stands for assume the crash position, means he is about to
start throwing things. This leader is very effective at creating an emotional
culture but it s probably not the one he wants.
So don t underestimate the importance of day-to-day modeling. Large, symbolic
emotional gestures are powerful, but only if they are in line with daily
behavior. Senior executives can also shape an emotional culture through
organizational practices. Take compassionate firing, which is common at
companies that build a strong culture of companionate love. Carlos Gutierrez,
the vice president of R&D systems at Lattice Semiconductor, was deeply
concerned about the impact of layoffs on his employees. He recognized that the
traditional HR protocol of asking terminated employees to clean out their desks
immediately and leave the premises would be especially painful to people who
had worked side by side for 10 to 20 years. Along with his partners in HR and R
&D, he implemented a protocol whereby employees had an extended time to say
good-bye to their colleagues and to commemorate their time together at the
company. Also, although two-thirds of the R&D workforce is outside the United
States, Sherif Sweha, the corporate vice president of R&D, believed it was
important for the affected team members in each region to receive the news from
a senior leader face-to-face. So he and members of his staff flew to the
company s sites in Asia to have in-person conversations with all the employees
to be laid off and also those who would remain with the company.
Though top management sets the first example and establishes the formal rules,
middle managers and frontline supervisors ensure that the emotional values are
consistently practiced by others. Because one of the biggest influences on
employees is their immediate boss, the suggestions that apply to senior
executives also apply to those managers: They should ensure that the emotions
they express at work reflect the chosen culture, and they should speak
explicitly about what is expected from employees.
It s also important to link the emotional culture to operations and processes,
including performance management systems. At Vail Resorts the culture of joy
has been incorporated into the annual review, which indicates how well each
employee integrates fun into the work environment and rates everyone on
supporting behaviors, such as being inclusive, welcoming, approachable, and
positive. Someone who exceeds expectations is described as not only taking part
in the fun but also offering recommendations to improve the work environment
to integrate fun.
Decades worth of research demonstrates the importance of organizational
culture, yet most of it has focused on the cognitive component. As we ve shown,
organizations also have an emotional pulse, and managers must track it closely
to motivate their teams and reach their goals.
Emotional culture is shaped by how all employees from the highest echelons to
the front lines comport themselves day in and day out. But it s up to senior
leaders to establish which emotions will help the organization thrive, model
those emotions, and reward others for doing the same. Companies in which they
do this have a lot to gain.
A version of this article appeared in the January February 2016 issue (pp.58
66) of Harvard Business Review.
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.