Don’t leave your emotions at home
Emotionality is often portrayed as the opposite of rationality in the workplace. At the most, managers or supervisors will caution employees to leave their emotions at home; at the minimum, employees are advised to keep their affective experiences within a relatively neutral range. In an ideal world, fear and anger would never influence our professional decision making skills. But things rarely unfold so neatly.
Colleagues infuriate us, our boss can drive us mad and a bad day at work can leave us feeling apprehensive and dejected. We need to recognise that even for the most even tempered employee, emotions are inseparable from our professional work and decision making process.
“When the management of a company faced difficult times, it realised that the only way that the company was going to survive was to cut down its activities”, recounts Industrial Phsycologist Francois Wilbers of Work Dynamics. “The decision to scale down was simply the result of a cognitive process of decision making- gathering information, analysing, comparing, assuming, inferring and evaluating. The rational consequences of down scaling the organisation meant retrenchments and job losses” says Wilbers.
“In this instance, emotions such as empathy and compassion for the affected employees were expressed and evaluated in the decision making process. The decision was taken to assist the affected employees to set up their own small businesses. After assisting the affected employees to acquire practical skills, a project manager was appointed to offer managerial support to the startups and assist the business owners to market their businesses. The organisation committed to sponsor the remuneration of the project manager for a period of five years”, explains Wilbers.
The businesses performed so well that in no time they managed to become self-sustainable. Within three years, the startups could afford to pay the salary of the project manager. Everything considered, the decision where emotions were dealt with appropriately was a better decision than if it were based on rational arguments only. Wilbers says “Research has shown that decision makers who are aware of their emotions tend to make better decisions. In the same study, decision makers who were unaware of their emotional state, or tried to suppress their emotions at the moment of making a decision, tended to make poorer judgment”.
“Decision making in the real world is characterised by time-pressure, vague and competing goals, extreme consequences, complex information integration and uncertainty,” says Wilbers. Understanding how the human mind makes decisions will help professionals make better decisions. Wilbers explains that the human mind makes use of three basic mental functions: cognition, emotion and volition. Although these components are theoretically distinct, they operate in a dynamic relationship with each other. Having insight into the decision making process will help professionals harness the power of emotion to make the best decision possible.
The cognition function includes analysing, comparing, assuming, inferring, and evaluating in the form of conceptualising, reasoning, and figuring things out. The emotion function deals with our internal monitor, emotions such happiness and sadness, from empathy and apathy, from hope to despair, from love to hate, informs us whether we are doing well or poorly in any given situation. The third function, our ultimate driving force, is the formation of volition. Like the engine of a car which revs us up and moves forward, volition is our agenda, purpose, goals, values, desires, drives, motivations and commitments.
These three functions consistently influence one another in mutual and reciprocal ways. Wherever there is thinking, some related drive and emotion exists and vice versa. Despite the fact that cognition, feeling and volition are equally important functions of the mind, it is cognition, or thinking, which is the key to the other two. “If we want to change a feeling, we must identify the thinking that ultimately leads to the feeling. If we want to change a desire, again it is the thinking underlying the drive that must be identified and altered, if our behavior is to alter,” explains Wilbers.
Negative cognitive, normative, and behavioral barriers in their organisations should be removed warns Wilbers. “There are different emotions we can ascribe to each and every decision we make. Positive emotion is the emotion we strive towards to reach a decisive, successful decision. The negative emotion, on the other hand, causes indecisiveness and procrastination, which could lead us to a wrong conclusion”.
Wilbers believes that managers or leaders need to be capacitated to describe and differentiate negative feelings during the decision making process by attending and differentiating between those emotions that may introduce bias into the decision making process.
To be in touch with their feelings and emotions, explains Wilbers, managers and leaders will need to carefully re-examine common beliefs, norms, languages, and practices that devalue, discourage, and constrain experiencing and expressing their feelings and emotions. “While the process of removing negative emotions may involve re-education and unlearning, developing ones knowledge of the different emotions, their underlying meanings, and the relationships of the emotions with each other will give professional organisations an advantage”.
