Organizations are fundamentally human enterprises. Great organizations unleash the power of their human resources to gain a unique advantage. These resources may not be a huge part of business, but it has a huge effect on it. Hence, there is a need of understanding and managing them effectively. However, in attempting to do so, I come across an ageless question? Are employees rational or emotional and what actually needs to be understood and managed in them?
Exploring the fields of cognitive and social psychology, behavioural economics, decision research, organizational behaviour, and neuroscience, I arrive at the point that employees are fundamentally emotional and what needs to be understood and managed is their emotions.
Emotion, in humans, fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience". Emotion is a complex psycho-physiological experience of an employee's state of mind as interacting with his biochemical and environmental influences.
Employees constantly seek emotional associations in organizations. Each and every thought and action is dependent on the state of emotion the employee is involved. It is believed, over years, that emotion and rationality as conflicting opposites but I opine that rationality itself is an emotion that employee expresses. Employees are essentially emotional beings having rational characteristics. Emotions form the basis of their rational decision-making. They do not make decisions without assessing – consciously and sub-consciously – the anticipated emotional pay-offs to be experienced from each choice/decision.
Emotions involve “thoughts” and related behaviors, and this thought process is the rational component of emotion. Thus, rationality is a subset of emotion. Employees when think they are being rational in their approach are expressing an emotion that is so inherent in them.
Hence, I view every employee as “EMOYEE” – Emotional Employee. Organizations, in order to succeed, need to manage these emoyee’s through an emotional index. The goal of this index is to identify, manage and nurture various performance enhancing, personality developing emotions that benefit of both the individual and organization.
Economies, in the future, would be emotional economies and hence the emphasis should be on emoyees and on the various emotional states they operate.
Couldn't agree more about employees' emotional needs and orientations being underserved or perhaps disrespected by the modern organizational environment. But how to take advantage of this observation: what are the implications for management styles, org.structures and environments, measures and incentives. How would you propose we find, nurture, and capture the contributions of EMOYEEs?
For example, I think you would enjoy the work of MIX Member Paul Herr, who has done a great deal of work figuring out how to apply 'hard science' tools to these so-called 'soft' attributes. Paul's methods measure the impact on employee motivation of certain aspects of work, such as acquiring skills, because as we now know the brain rewards us with pleasure chemicals for achieving certain things.
That's one example of how a more holistic view of human beings in the workplace can lead to new tools for upgrading management. I recognize you are suggesting something more in the emotional space, but I think the next leap is similar - how do we make a new management tool or practice from your observation?
Thanks for the contribution!
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