Organizational Learning, Politics, and Emotion

Despite the awareness that reason and emotion define each other, we often imagine that organizations are rational places, where we can use our intellectual abilities and our knowledge to implement decisions, to problem solve, and to take the organization forward. And this is true—we can do this through rational and intellectual endeavor. However, rationality is only one aspect of our experience and our knowledge in organizations. We also know that organizations overflow with stated and unstated emotions; with complex inter-personal relations; and with politics and power. Learning in organizations and the organization of learning processes are inevitably bound up with political dynamics, with power, and with resistance. So, how are we to understand politics in relation to learning? Politics is

a term used to describe the activity of individuals, groups, organizations or institutions in mobilising resources and enrolling people to support a policy, plan or project . . . politics is a practice of securing compliance or consent . . . politics might be the practice of resistance to the established power relations . . . (or) it is just as likely to be a question of power struggles between different groups of managers

(Odih and Knights, 2007: 336)

In our view, an interest in emotion in organizations should seek to address the ways in which emotions, as they interweave with political problems, are individually felt and collectively produced and performed. Thus, what seems like collaboration to managers may feel like control to their staff; what feels like a concession to managers may be experienced as an insult by their workers; or what is intended as reconciliation by one group may be experienced as a climb-down by another. Learning and knowledge, themselves, lie squarely at the heart of such emotional politics. Who gains and who is denied knowledge? What knowledge is on offer and on what terms? How is knowledge to be used and in whose interest? These are all deeply political issues and ones liable to arouse powerful emotions in individuals and groups. The complexity of relations that are mobilized by the interplay between emotions and politics create, for example, surprising, self-limiting, innovative, unexpected, uncomfortable, and unwanted structures for action.

The interplay between emotion and politics in organizations concerns how organizations function as emotional places (not how individuals within organizations can ‘have’ or ‘manage’ emotion); it concerns how decisions, strategies, and actions are shaped, subverted, and/or transformed by emotions; and it concerns how emotions become embedded in cultural and political practices that determine ‘the way we do things here.’ Engaging with the interplay between emotion and politics in organizations goes some way to unsettling the conventional view of organizations ‘as rationally ordered, appropriately structured, and emotion free life spaces, where the right decisions are made for the right reasons by the right people, in a reliable and predictable manner’ (Kersten, 2001: 452). Studies that have been concerned specifically with the relationship between emotion and politics have shown that emotion is essential to control processes, and that emotions need to be understood in terms of the social and political structures of which they are a part (Fineman and Sturdy, 1999). Emotions underpin and influence behavior in organizations in ways that create distinctive political dynamics and organizing processes (Vince, 2001, 2002). The generation of knowledge about the emotions and politics that underpin organizing adds to opportunities for behavior that can ‘unsettle conventional practices’ (Cunliffe and Easterby-Smith, 2004). Emotion guides individuals in appraising social situations and responding to them, therefore emotional display is part of an inter-personal, meaning creating process (Antonacopoulou and Gabriel, 2001).

An important distinction that illuminates the relation between emotion, politics, and learning is that between ‘learning-in-action’ and ‘learning inaction’ (Vince, 2008, 2010). The phrase ‘learning-in-action’ represents the productive relationship between learning and practice. For example, we know that learning can be ‘generative’ in the sense that it can underpin improvements in practice over time. Popular, action-based approaches to learning like ‘action learning’ are based on the premise that membership of action-learning groups can assist individuals in the development of strategic actions, which then can be tested and potentially transformed in practice (see Pedler, 2002). However, the politics surrounding learning in organizations also trigger a different and altogether less positive dynamic, one that leads to inertia and even paralysis. This is called ‘learning inaction’ because participants in learning groups also have (conscious and unconscious) knowledge, fantasies, and perceptions about when it is emotionally and politically expedient to refrain from action, when to avoid collective action, and the organizational dynamics that underpin a failure or refusal to act. We often know what the political limits of learning are in our organizations without having to be told; we collude with others in order to create limitations on learning; and we are often aware of what is and is not going to be seen as a legitimate result of our attempts to learn. We are (consciously or unconsciously) aware of the organizational dynamics that underpin a failure to act at the same time as we are positively engaged in learning activities to improve practice. The paradoxical tension of learning in organizations is that it is desired and resisted at the same time. Such tensions at the heart of both learning-in-action and learning inaction create anxiety for individuals, groups, and organizations.