Posted: June
2009 by Peter Smith
One may provide all the rational understanding
and wherewithal for individuals or communities
to accomplish a given objective, but if they
don’t want to do it then it won’t happen, or the
effort will be half-hearted with predictable
results.
Surely this simple truth is common knowledge,
but much of the organizational managerial
establishment still doesn’t get it - having
‘power over’ may make you feel good, but it’s a
strategy that starts off suboptimal and goes
down hill from there. Of course organizations do
routinely operate under a façade of rationality,
but they still over-emphasize the
goal-orientation that drives them, and
under-value the expressive arenas of life; this
in spite of a large influx of women into the
workforce.
In 1973 Gerard Egan wrote “Emotional repression
is undoubtedly still a far greater problem than
emotional overindulgence” [1]. Some thirty-odd
years later this statement is as true as ever in
my opinion; society still equates management
capability with emotional maturity. This
translates as the control or repression of
feelings, and organizations continue to use the
word ‘emotional’ in a derogatory sense. Indeed,
since managers are often guarded in their
feelings, they prefer others to behave in the
same way: “It is thought uncivil, rude,
unconventional, unwarranted, and even obscene to
express feelings toward others. Emotional
insulation parades under such euphemisms as
‘respect for others’ and ‘the dignity of
privacy’” [21]; I would go further an include
parades as ‘respect for our leaders and
managers’.
Putnum and Mumby quote Lutz who sums it up well:
“In addition to treating emotion as a
physiological state, people regard emotion as a
value-laden concept which is often treated as
‘inappropriate’ for organizational life. In
particular, emotional reactions are often seen
as ‘disruptive’, ‘illogical’, ‘biased’ and
‘weak’. Emotion, then, becomes a deviation from
what is seen as intelligent” [3]. Perhaps there
is a fear in leaders and managers that focusing
on emotional energy leads to loss of control;
this is not the case: “Organizations do not need
to abandon instrumental goals, productivity, or
rationality to develop alternative modes of
discourse. Emphasizing work feelings calls for
including what is currently ignored or
marginalized in organizational life. Rationality
is not an objective, immutable state. Rather it
is socially constructed and cast as the dominant
mode of organizing. Rationality and technical
efficiency, however, should be embedded in a
larger system of community and interrelatedness.
Perhaps organizations of the future could offer
society a new alternative, one shaped by
emotionally-connected creativity and mutual
understanding as necessary elements for human
growth.” [4].
A growing issue is that so much interpersonal
communication is no longer face-to-face but
‘second-hand’ - mediated through technology, and
“Technology makes it easy to fake authenticity,
to manipulate it, to have encounters that seem
authentic but are not” [5]; however, although
technology such as email seems tailor-made for
the powerful elite to hand out ‘the tablets’,
social networking tools such as twitter and
facebook offer huge opportunities for honest
social interaction, and indeed demand a level of
emotional honesty for social network trust and
acceptance. I am encouraged by the way social
networking tools leverage the
community-influence of individuals to combat
‘power-over’ e.g. the political struggle in
Iran. I also see why there will be resistance to
inclusion of such tools in an organization’s
inernal-use technology portfolio – but we can
hope!
Social systems are highly complex and there is
no guarantee that a particular seemingly
desirable starting condition, such as the
widespread introduction of social networking
technology into organizations, will result in a
desirable end-state. I do believe though that it
would be a step in the right direction, helping
to redirect the emotional labor that employees
currently expend in subverting authoritarianism
and emotional control, and channel it such that
they display leadership in, and take personal
responsibility for, shaping their own
self-organizing system. “Here, ideally, people
would give up some of their uniqueness to help
build the edifice or common system, rather than
clamoring for more power for their system, which
then gets experienced as power over other
people” [6].
Human nature being what it is, I do not believe
that it is possible to build a paradise where an
organization will fully succeed in dealing
appropriately with all the complexities of the
interactions within its social systems. I do
believe however that an organization can strike
an adequate balance between
power-over/rationality/technical efficiency and
non-rational factors, such that each field
contributes to, and supports the other, in
optimizing performance. I contend that by
adopting this approach the quality of work, and
work life of the organization, would be vastly
enhanced over time, and that the ground would be
well prepared for general adoption of much
needed traits of leadership and personal
responsibility at all employee levels.
I would like to hear your views -
please contact me
to further explore these topics.
Notes
[1] Egan, G., Face To Face, Brooks/Cole
Publishing, Monterey, 1973; pp. 61
[2] Egan, G., Face To Face, Brooks/Cole
Publishing, Monterey, 1973; pp. 64
[3] Putnam, L.L., Mumby, D.K., Organizations,
Emotion and the Myth of Rationality, in S.
Fineman (Ed), Emotion in Organizations, Sage
Publications, London, 1993; pp. 36
[4] Putnam, L.L., Mumby, D.K., Organizations,
Emotion and the Myth of Rationality, in S.
Fineman (Ed), Emotion in Organizations, Sage
Publications, London, 1993; pp. 55
[5] Lukensmeyer, C.J., Parlett, M., Power,
Change, And Authenticity: A Political And
Gestalt Perspective, British Gestalt Journal,
Vol. 6, No. 1, 1997; pp. 7
[6] Lukensmeyer, C.J., Parlett, M., Power,
Change, And Authenticity: A Political And
Gestalt Perspective, British Gestalt Journal,
Vol. 6, No. 1, 1997; pp. 13
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