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Essay on Emotion in Organisations

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This paper researches the impact that emotions have within the professional work environment. The age old debate between experts who believe that emotions should try and be marginalized at work and those who believe that the workplace would be a mundane environment that would breed boredom and kill creativity, still carries on through today. Through the course of the literature, various writers offer their viewpoints on how imperative they believe emotional linkages at the workplace are. Some focus on specific kinds of emotions such as stress and motivation and look to see the varying impacts that they have. Finally, the literature is able to conclude that emotions are in fact, an essential embodiment of the organisation - it is the engine that fuels ideas, the creative spirit, keeps teams and individuals working together and harnesses all their energies towards a singular purpose - that which is in sync with the larger organisational goals and strategies.

INTRODUCTION
Emotions are the most natural exhibit that we humans possess. Without them, we would not have been different from the other species today. At the same time, there is a destructive trait to emotions as well. They can push individuals to behave in unusual ways - it is precisely this reason why organisations have tried to curb the level of emotion that is displayed at the workplace. However, there are a large number of positives that can be associated through the display of emotions - individuals tend to behave in a more normalised way and can think and execute tasks more efficiently. The problem that most management teams have is in finding the right balance between the levels of emotions that can be displayed within their company and how stringent should their rules be to ensure that emotional displays are curbed.

What we will also find is that management teams across organisations have become insensitive towards the needs of their employees. Over time, they have been so occupied with trying to maintain a certain degree of discipline that they have failed to recognise emotional issues that creep into individuals. This is an important facet of this paper since the failure to identify with their employees has resulted in a variety of problems that could have been avoided otherwise. And when the same problem is quantified into money losses by organisations every year, it just highlights how serious the problem really is and how companies have failed to prioritise their human resource issues sweeping a lot of what they don't want to see under the carpet.

LITERATURE REVIEW - Organisational Structure


Understanding the organisational structure of a company is extremely important since it defines the different cultural and social norms that may be found within the company. The foundation for most organisational structures originates from centuries back when the only defined structures that represented an organisation were state run and large military institutions. In today's contemporary times, most organisations borrow their structural frameworks from the earlier days. There is one significant difference though as years have passed, organisations have grown from being merely structural frameworks of people to hosting various social and intangible forces that impact the organisation as much as the tangibles. As Handy (1999) in his work - "Inside Organisations" states that organisations today, are made up of complicated masses of social and cultural strands. These bind organisations together and provide them with an identity of their own. (Handy, Charles (1999) Inside Organisations, pgs: 115-119)

There are different kinds of emotional issues that find their way into an organisation that impact all decision-making across different levels of the organisation. This is perhaps why the existence of emotional issues within an organisation is so important to any and every issue. This paper looks to understand the importance of whether or not emotions should be an intrinsic part of the organisational environment or not.

There are conflicting views on how useful the presence of emotions amongst employees is. On one hand, emotions are a hindrance to the successful and efficient functioning of an organisation. They create strong opinions amongst employees, which can lead to friction amongst employees as well as employees and their line managers. The presence of high emotions is usually due to the presence of high stress levels within the company. And these are a result of personal influencers, office environmental pressures etc. As we shall see later, as a norm, most companies prefer not have very high levels of emotions within their employees. On the other hand, there are some positive influences that emotions have on the professional environment. It ensures that people behave in their natural ways and are more capable of executing their tasks without having to worry about nuances that arise as a result of pressures. In addition, there are some writers who believe that the right quantities of stress can in fact help individuals perform better than they usually do by preparing them to be more alert and brace their bodies to cope with more than they usually cater for.

Emotion related issues within organisations

The way individuals in the working environment feel about different aspects of their job matters in today's workplace. According to gurus in the field of emotional intelligence, it is advisable for companies to be sensitive towards the emotions of their managers and their customers since their feelings can help determine the outcome of a particular situation.

Kemp (2005) believes that emotions in the work place result in a series of problems that managers find themselves faced with in their workplace. Some of the more common problems he has encountered in his studies are: "
Personal issues - Employees react to one another because of personal traits that they either like or dislike in their peers and this can cause some serious problems in the smooth execution of work. For instance, employees can take offence towards another due to a simple problem such as bad breath or body odour. "
Workplace Antics - Bullying or ganging up in office environments are as real as the grapevine. Management must be aware that there are peer pressures and groups that form based on interests and other circumstances. Organisations need to protect against this and ensure that teams formed are always from a neutral perspective. "
Employee Orientation - New employees can face a stiff battle to be accepted by existing employees and this can lead to complications since the new recruit has been taken on to execute a specific role within the business and the longer the candidate takes to be accepted, the greater the losses felt by the company and the more the inefficiency. "

Harassment - Gender harassment, particulary towards women is a common occurrence in the workplace and regulations govern any such harassment very stringently. However, a lot of cases don't get reported simply because the subjected women are ambiguous about what defines harassment. Educating them is the way forward since it will free the environment that they work in. "
Daily problems - Organisations face rebellious employees who are impunctual, poorly dressed and are complexed with attitude problems towards their peers. Usually this stems from some grievance or the other they have with the management and should be taken up before it goes out of hand. "
Miscellaneous problems - Outbursts of anger on the job is usually due to the build up of stress within employees. There is also the fear of superiors that inhibit employees from talking about their problems or contributing effectively in a team. In this case, organisations lose out on valuable inputs that employees may have since they are too scared to share them with their team. Lastly, there are a large number of employees who fall sick due to emotional issues that they are dealing with beyond the scope of work. Many take 'sickies' just to cope with personal pressures. The organisation should grant employees reasonable time off from their work whenever required in the legal limits. The problem that many employees face is that companies might legally outline 30 paid days of leave in a year but refuse to grant employees their full quota saying that the work load is too high for them to go on leave. Additionally, employees genuinely fall sick because of pressures that are built on them as discussed later in the paper.

The organisation has more to gain when it is sensitive towards the needs of its employees and is a more productive organisation in turn. (Kemp, Sid (2005) Perfect Solutions for Difficult Employees, pgs: 89-151)

What follows is a series of different kinds of emotions that are present within an organisation and the reasons why they come into being through various influences.

Stress
Stress is one of the more discussed affects that influence the emotional well being of individuals in every sphere of their lives. It is common in today's business environment to hear statements such as - 'My sales team is extremely stressed trying to meet their quarterly targets', or 'That manager is overburdened with work and doesn't have the resources to make things easier for him, which could lead to a stress attack'. Whichever way one looks at it, stress has become an important facet of our lives today. People are stressed about everything - take the example of an ordinary working man's life from morning to evening - waking up in the morning, the traffic to work, getting in on time to work, dealing with the pressures of work and peers at work, improper diets, balancing one's personal life with the professional life and so on and so forth.

In fact, the word stress has been stigmatised by society today and is treated as a disease. According to the UK Health and Safety Committee, stress is the reason why two-fifths of the working population in Britain take sick leaves through lying. This form of absenteeism costs the British industry a shocking 15 million working days. That equates to millions of pounds worth of business inefficiency and loss in productivity. It is important that companies come to terms with the infusion of emotions into the workplace and the problems that they bring with them. (Edwards, Howard (2003) Stress in the workplace - How to Cause it, pg: 18)

In an interesting article published at the time of writing this paper, the writer Alan Bunce looks to investigate any positives that can be drawn from the presence of stress in an organisation. According to Bunce, whilst stress impacts on the capacity of an individual to deliver, the existence of stress alone does not dictate the productivity of an employee, and in turn, the overall efficiency of the organisation. What is important is the way stress is tackled by individual employees. The writer explains how a person, depending on the level of emotional intelligence that the he / she possesses; usually handles emotions. In the past, successful people within the corporate community were judged based on their level of intellectual quotient or IQ. In time however, successful managers needed to deal with managing people better and managing an increase in emotions in the workplace as well as managing their own pressures better. In order to do this, it was imperative that successful managers possess a high emotional intelligence that allowed them to understand their environment better, show increased levels of sensitivity towards their fellow employees and motivate their staff to perform better as opposed to doing so in an autocratic way.

Bunce believes that in the past, the understanding was that the higher the IQ an individual possesses, the higher up the corporate ladder would the individual be able to climb. But emotional stress is also directly proportional to the level of success an individual achieves. There is far more pressures to deal with and far more at stake as responsibilities increase and liabilities add up. Hence, to manage these peripherals become a priority in comparison to managing information know-how and professional experience. Individuals who can climb the ladder and manage their emotional pressures better are far more composed people at the top of the management cadre and are better role models for the younger corporate achievers. Additionally, being able to maintain their composure under pressure enables these individuals to perform and think through crisis situations far more efficiently than an individual who would buckle under the same pressures. (Reading Chronicle "Stress Busting can be good for your workplace health", UK - Thursday, 10th March 2005).

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