Organizations, Management, and Emotion

Most perspectives agree that emotion contributes to ‘seeing things differently’ (Hochschild, 1983) and plays a significant part in rational thought and action (Williams, 2001). Asking questions about the ways in which emotions are connected to rational decisions raises opportunities for new knowledge and action and helps to redress the traditional imbalance whereby ‘emotion is routinely subordinated to rationality’ (Ten Bos and Willmott, 2001). It has thus been argued that the tendency of many managers to rationalize emotion creates additional emotional dynamics which provide opportunities for reflection, both in terms of understanding organizing processes and revealing the politics of managerial actions (Vince, 2006). Attempts to rationalize away emotions are themselves an exercise of political power which generates opportunities for further thought, critique, and development; they are themselves elements of the emotional dynamics of organizations. Emotion is a continuous and integral aspect of organizing, but this does not mean that emotions should be studied separately from the various rationalizations that relate to them. While studies of emotion challenge the dominance of rationalist assumptions, it is important to avoid, first, reversing this emphasis by privileging emotion at the expense of rationality (Ten Bos and Willmott, 2001) and, second, creating a fixed dichotomy or binary opposition which locks emotion and rationality into a relationship of permanent conflict (Carr, 2001). Instead, it is more useful to examine how particular organizational dynamics emerge, and the contribution that emotion and reason have made to creating and sustaining them. Emotion and reason may define each other, at times reinforcing each other and at times generating tensions and arguments.

One way of drawing emotion and reason closer has consisted of recent attempts to develop the idea of ‘emotional intelligence.’ Emotional intelligence emphasizes the impact that reason can make on emotion. The claim made for this perspective is that it represents ‘an ability to perceive, to process, to understand, and to manage emotions in self and others’ (Mayer and Salovey, 1997). Proponents of emotional intelligence maintain that there are distinct individual abilities and skills that relate to the explicit management of emotion; skills that can be developed over time and enhanced by training. Therefore, learning to perceive and manage the emotions of others and one’s own is often viewed as ‘an important tool in every manager’s kit’ (Ashkanasy and Daus, 2002: 82). Others have seen such approaches as being aimed to appropriate and commodify emotional displays and private feelings, turning them into ‘yet another technology through which selves become enterprising and flexible . . . its objective (is) the rendering of subjectivity into a calculable force. By being made calculable, emotions are made amenable to management and control’ (Landen, 2002: 517). The attempt to tame and control emotional displays and experiences in organizations represents in its own way a strong desire to avoid confronting complexities of the relationship between emotion and rationality in organizations. The discourse of emotional intelligence, under the guise of elevating and honoring the emotional dimensions of organizational life, ultimately subordinates emotions to managerial expediencies and organizational controls. Instead, we advocate a more complex and practical understanding to be had from appreciating the interplay between emotion and rationality. Our focus is not on individuals’ competences in managing emotions and, ultimately, using them as an instrument of calculating and instilling compliance in others. Instead, we believe that understanding the interplay of emotion and rationality can provide a deeper knowledge to inform and guide our actions and relations.

Our discussion of organizations, learning and emotion can build on the idea that ‘every organization . . . is an emotional place. It is an emotional place because it is a human invention, serving human purposes and dependent on human beings to function. And human beings are emotional animals: ‘subject to anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness or joy, ease and unease’ (Armstrong, 2000: 1). Here, we are concerned both with individuals’ feelings in organizations and also with the collective production of emotional scripts that help people feel connected to organizational norms and guide their emotional responses to different situations. Fineman (2001) has offered a plausible explanation of the difference between feelings and emotions. He suggests that feelings are fundamentally private experiences and that emotion can be defined as the public performance of feelings. Emotional displays depend on an audience on which the performance of feelings is designed (consciously or unconsciously) to have a strategic effect. Thus, emotional displays are regulated by the actor’s internal state as well as political webs of social rules and conventions.

While emotions are always located within webs of social rules or power relations, the view of feelings as private experiences may promote a misleading distinction. Psychodynamic theory offers the insight that feelings are not only private experiences, but are shaped by and linked to the internalization or denial of relations with other people (French and Vince, 1999). In this sense, therefore, both feelings and emotions are always social. In addition, one has to ask who is being represented in the public performance of feelings: is the performance of a feeling (such as outrage, shame or fear) the ‘property’ of an individual, or might it also include those persons and collectives whose influences, conflicts, and defenses encourage the acting out of specific emotional scripts? The experience of being a ‘scapegoat,’ for example, although private and isolating for the target, suggests that individuals can become conscious and unconscious victims and mouthpieces of group dynamics or organizational politics. The importance of this idea within this chapter is that such dynamics are not only linked to the labeling of an individual, but also to the unconscious labeling work of the collective (i.e. the ways in which definitions of ‘how we do things here’ emerge and become accepted). The definition of emotions as the public performance of feelings is important and useful because it reminds us that individuals’ emotions are not detached from the context within which they are being expressed, managed, and/or organized.

From this perspective an interest in emotion in organizations is not about understanding personal emotions (whether this involves being reintroduced to early experiences, developing ‘self-awareness,’ or acquiring ‘emotional intelligence’), so much as discovering what emotions say about an organization as a system in context (Armstrong, 2000). Emotions, both conscious and unconscious, which are individually felt and collectively produced and performed, are interwoven with politics and power in organizations. Emotion and politics inform and recreate each other within organizations.