Getting Serious: Emotions in the Workplace

Why should we care about what our co-workers are feeling? Historically, emotions in the workplace were not taken seriously by practitioners, managers, or academics. In fact, many viewed emotions as inappropriate in the workplace, and employees were expected to do what was necessary to avoid showing, if not feeling, emotions at work. But when real and serious violence crept up in the workplace in ways most of us hope never to encounter—the postal worker shot, hostage situations, and other sundry tales—people began to pay attention. How are employees’ emotions affected by the current work environment characterized by rapid change and continuous restructurings and downsizings? Research by Mel Fugate of SMU Cox and co-authors offers a new perspective on how emotions operate in the context of organizational change. The authors show what influences emotions, and in turn, how emotions affect important outcomes for employees and employers alike.

Change often requires monumental efforts, such as transforming both individual and organizational identities. And, emotion invariably permeates change. Much of the research about emotions in the workplace has primarily focused on managing emotion during organizational change.  Relatively little research explores how organizational change might generate these emotions and how these emotions are linked to significant organizational outcomes. Emotions play a critical, albeit often overlooked, role in organizational change that organizations, managers, and change agents must account for in order to successfully navigate change.

A fundamental premise of the study is that appraisal, emotion, and coping interact in a web of reciprocal relationships, wherein each is the cause and effect of the others. Appraisal—an individual’s evaluation of his or her well-being as it relates to the surrounding environment—is “the genesis of emotions,” Fugate explains. “It’s the connection between the person and his or her environment, which links them interdependently. And, it is the first way in which one interacts within the environment.” In other words, individuals appraise the meaning of changes at work, and it is this appraisal that then sets subsequent emotions and coping efforts in motion. Coping, being adaptive in nature, evolves as a situation changes; individuals adapt their thoughts and behaviors as a situation plays out. Coping acts as the bridge that links appraisal and emotions in a dynamic process that influences outcomes relevant to the individual and the organization (e.g., stress and involuntary turnover).

Why It Matters
Change—manifested through mergers, downsizings, reorganizations, and technological advances—is often viewed as a shock or a threat. Such threats generally induce emotion-based or escape coping, or other attempts to regulate negative emotions as an employee feels unable to control a changing environment. Such coping strategies often lead to withdrawal, whereby employees distance themselves from the organization through, for example, absenteeism and voluntary turnover. Earlier research found that managers facing restructuring were more likely to withdraw and reduce their level of loyalty to the company. Another study found that when employees do not accept change they feel stronger intentions to quit. Fugate explains, “There is a big problem when valuable people leave a firm; it is a significantly under-measured cost to the organization—those who leave whom you don’t want to leave. Employees may believe that the upcoming changes will foreclose opportunities to them. Even worse is when people act on perceptions or suspicions (e.g., perceiving change as threatening) that may not be accurate.  We need to know what the determinants are of those perceptions as well as their outcomes, so employers can use these as levers with which to manage the change process.”

The study of 141 employees from a public services organization was conducted at the time of major organizational change and a 12-month period following the changes. Results showed that employees who perceived changes as threatening and harmful were also significantly more likely to have negative emotional reactions to the changes, and vice versa. Employees’ appraisals of the changes were critical and important determinants of emotions and coping.

In Theory and Practice
Prior research portrayed appraisal as a linear process and posited an overly simplistic view of emotions. Fugate and his co-authors write:

These traditional views describe (negative) emotions in almost weed-like terms, as unwanted responses that crop up and simply need to be cut back. Moreover, bracketing emotions with appraisal and coping encloses feelings within a rational cocoon that ultimately discounts the importance of emotions and suggests a façade of controllability. In contrast, the dynamic model supported in this study dissolves this rational cocoon, and appraisal, emotion, and coping emerge as components of an interpenetrated process in which each influences the other.

Fugate and co-authors tried to get at the idea that appraisal is more complex, as one would intuitively believe. It’s not so rational, linear, or simplistic. This study extends theory and research related to personality psychology and the cognitive sciences (e.g., neural networks), and shows how meta-systems of constructs operate in concert to influence individual experience and action related to organizational change. Thus appraisal, emotion, and coping act as a connected, dynamic system in which the activation of one construct serves to activate the others. The authors argue that the complex appraisal system revealed may, in part, explain the personal variability found across situations. In other words, it may help explain why two people confronted with the same changes at work sometimes have radically different experiences and reactions.

The findings illustrate an important function of emotions—giving meaning to individual experience. Emotions help differentiate important details, such as distinguishing excitement versus pleasure for positive experiences and anger versus disappointment for negative experiences. In so doing, emotions provide more granularity to one’s experience. For instance, emotion helps focus attention on important elements in the environment and thereby fine-tunes appraisals, and in turn, more detailed appraisals alter the emotional responses. Current findings also demonstrate that control coping reduces intentions to quit. This is a clear benefit as intentions to quit are positively related to voluntary turnover. These results highlight the importance of emotions in organizational change and suggest that managers and researchers should consider employees’ emotions as important determinants of coping and outcomes related to organizational change. 

Managers should target interventions at improving employees’ appraisals of change. It thus seems important for managers to frame changes in a positive light and to articulate the benefits of change to the larger organization and the affected individuals. Employee involvement in planning and implementing change is likely to make employees feel more informed, more in control, and reduce negative appraisals. For example, appraisals can be manipulated such that threat appraisals can be changed to challenge appraisals. In turn, challenge appraisals promote psychological resilience and beneficial psycho-physiological outcomes (i.e., less stress).

Fugate advises managers to really pay attention to emotions. “Emotions are a much finer grained view of people’s experience. When confronted by a change at work, if I know as a manager whether an employee feels threatened or harmed, it makes a big difference qualitatively,” Fugate advises. “If you feel threatened, you will be concerned about what will happen in the future regarding opportunities, for example. If you feel harmed, this then relates to things lost in the past or as a result of the changes, such as loss of co-workers, interesting work, promotion opportunities. As a manager, this informs as to how to manage.”  Fugate relays some examples:

• If loss of interesting work is at issue, then a manager could consult with the employee as to what could be done to create more interesting and stimulating work.
  
• If employees feels threatened and concerned about their future, then a manager might not only share his or her vision about where the changes will take the company, but also specifically how such changes will affect the employees. For example, changes often create new opportunities and employees need to know what their roles are in the change process, as well as what they personally may gain. Regardless, a key to mitigating threat is to remove uncertainty.  As a manager, you should explain the motives for the changes and the role you see for concerned employees.

In Conclusion
The current study also has important implications for models of organizational change. The majority of organizational change perspectives focus at the organization or industry level. Fugate states, “Our approach informs other models and speaks to how the individual adapts in much greater detail.” Through appraisal, the researchers are proposing an alternative means in examining individuals’ emotional reactions to change. Coping is a process and people cope to adapt and survive. Appraisal and emotions are critical components of this process. Employees in the study who appraised the changes as negative were more likely to withdraw from the organization. Withdrawing (e.g., quitting) presumably improved their situations and was thus adaptive.

Employees’ experiences with organizational change are undoubtedly a complex collage of competing appraisals and emotions—negative and positive. This study provides another step in unraveling the individual psychology that underlies the role of emotions. On the academic side, the research is a significant theoretical advancement. But the authors go one step further—testing their framework in the real world, with compelling results.

The research paper “The Role of Emotion During Organizational Change: An Appraisal Theory and Dynamic Systems Perspective” is written by Mel Fugate of the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University and Spencer Harrison and Angelo J. Kinicki of Arizona State University.

Research summary written by Jennifer Warren.