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Hi
guys, welcome to Week 11. This week we are going to discuss something about
processes of emotion in the workplace. Emotion? Yes, because communication and
operation in organisations are not purely logical and rational. Decision-making
processes, for instance, could not be perfectly rational because of cognitive
and situational limits on rationality.
Emotion
is part of the job. In many cases, communication between employee and client
involves some degree of emotional or affective content, such as nurses and
physicians. Hochschild (1983, cited in Miller 2012, p.200) uses the term “emotional
labour” to refer to jobs in which workers are expected to display certain
feelings in order to satisfy organisational role expectations.
Miller
et al. (2007, cited in Miller 2012, p.201) use the term emotional work to
describe people who are not in frontline service jobs but instead hold
professional positions in industries where emotion management are rarely
recognised by workers.
Individuals
in all organisational roles feel emotion in the workplace. A number of aspects
of work relationships are largely emotional.
l Psychological
abuse (bullying)
l Feelings
and emotional display
l The
tension between the public and private in work relationships
l Relational
networks and emotional buzz
l Conflicting
allegiances
l Emotional
rights and obligations at work
Understanding
the emotion rules for emotional display in the workplace and understanding the
role that emotional intelligence might play in a wide variety of workplace
interaction are very critical.
Negative
emotions are likely to jeopardise organisational performance, the investigation
of stress in the workplace plays a crucial role in coping with negative
emotions in organisations.
There
are some key concepts must take into consideration:
Burnout
– refers to a “wearing out” from pressures of work.
Stressors
– workload, role conflict and role ambiguity
There
are many ways an individual might react to burnout:
l Problem-centred
coping
l Appraisal-centred
coping
l Emotion-centred
coping
Organisation
can also play a role in reducing burnout:
l Participation
in decision making
l Social
support
It
is quite obvious that emotions, including anger, fear, frustration, hurt, give
us clues about what needs to change in our workplace, in our approach to jobs,
or in our relationship with co-workers.
In this week's tutorial, we discussed
quite a lot about emotion and its workplace and even social influences. We used
an example regarding the NSW bushfire media briefing, the emotional response by
RFS commissioner Shane Fitzsimmons is noteworthy because his break-down can not
only stimulate frontline firefighters who fighting severe bushfires in NSW but
also stimulate firefighters in other states. We found that
His emotion is a kind of positive energy
motivating firefighters to protect our homes.
This
week, I’d recommend you guys to watch Rachel Green’s interview with Steve
Wells. A very interesting and concise conversation with respect to emotional
processes in organisational communication.
References:
Green, R 2011, What values are emotions in the workplace? with Emotional Intelligence coach Rachel Green, video, YouTube, 6 October, viewed 12 November 2013,
Miller, K 2012, Organisational communication – approaches
and processes, 6th edn, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Boston.
Seven News 2013, RFS
Commissioner breaks down, video,
YouTube, 17 October, viewed 20 October 2013,
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-5brBb-gqQ>
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