Communicating Emotion At Work

Communicating Emotion at Work chronicles the rich emotional experiences of employees drawn from a broad cross-section of industries and occupations. It takes a decidedly positive approach, recognizing that emotional communication is a vital and creative response to the challenges of life in complex organizations. The text introduces readers to the engaging and cross-disciplinary body of research that has emerged around organizational emotion. At the same time, each chapter is steeped in real-life emotional narratives, concrete examples, and the contemporary trends that are changing the emotional tenor of work.

Getting to the heart of what binds and breaks organizations: emotion, Stephen Fineman explores beyond the surface of work to the rich emotional life bubbling underneath, showing what employees and managers constantly deal with but are often ill-equipped to do so.

A pioneering expert on emotions delivers a guide for accessing the genius in emotions to create a productive and healthy workplace for all. In spite of countless organizational fix-it books, team-building exercises, and consulting experts, it’s hard to find a truly healthy workplace. Research shows 85% of workers avoid communicating crucial workplace problems upward, while 71% are actively looking for other jobs. Why? “The foundational problem is that we threw emotions out of the workplace, when in fact, emotions contain the information we need to make our workplaces work,” says Karla McLaren. Now this renowned researcher shares her insights on the skills most needed—and most often absent in the business world—for building functional and sustainable workplaces. We’ve all been taught to avoid emotions at work, but this inevitably leads to losses in productivity, creativity, and job satisfaction. With The Power of Emotions at Work, McLaren teaches communication and empathy skills to help you create a healthy and functional environment that benefits everyone. You’ll learn to recognize each other’s emotional roles, how to support the “emotional laborers” in your workplace, and much more. McLaren calls the workplace an “unintentional community,” because without access to their emotions, people don’t have the tools they need to function. This resource helps executives, managers, and workers understand and engage with emotions at work to create healthy and intentional communities where people and projects can thrive.

In a global survey by the Katzenbach Center, 80 percent of respondents believed that their organization must evolve to succeed. But a full quarter of them reported that a change effort at their organization had resulted in no visible results. Why? The fate of any change effort depends on whether and how leaders engage their culture: the self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing that determine how things are done in an organization. Culture is implicit rather than explicit, emotional rather than rational—that's what makes it so hard to work with, but that's also what makes it so powerful. For the first time, this book lays out the Katzenbach Center's proven methodology for identifying your culture's three most critical elements: traits, characteristics that are at the heart of people's emotional connection to what they do; keystone behaviors, actions that would lead your company to succeed if they were replicated at a greater scale; and authentic informal leaders, people who have a high degree of “emotional intuition” or social connectedness. By leveraging these critical few elements, you can tap into a source of catalytic change within your organization. People will make an emotional, not just a rational, commitment to new initiatives. You will elicit enthusiasm and creativity and build the kind of powerful company that people recognize for its innate value and effectiveness.

This book addresses questions about communication and emotion that are important to everyday life.

The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication offers a comprehensive collection of entries contributed by international experts on the origin, evolution, and current state of knowledge of all facets of contemporary organizational communication. Represents the definitive international reference resource on a topic of increasing relevance, in a new series of sub-disciplinary international encyclopedias Examines organization communication across a range of contexts, including NGOs, global corporations, community cooperatives, profit and non-profit organizations, formal and informal collectives, virtual work, and more Features topics ranging from leader-follower communication, negotiation and bargaining and organizational culture to the appropriation of communication technologies, emergence of inter-organizational networks, and hidden forms of work and organization Offers an unprecedented level of authority and diverse perspectives, with contributions from leading international experts in their associated fields Part of The Wiley Blackwell-ICA International Encyclopedias of Communication series, published in conjunction with the International Communication Association. Online version available at Wiley Online Library Awarded 2017 Best Edited Book award by the Organizational Communication Division, National Communication Association

Emotion is once again at the forefront of research in social psychology and personality. The Handbook of Communication and Emotion provides a comprehensive look at the questions and answers of interest in the field: How are specific emotions (fear, jealousy, anger, love) communicated? How does the effectiveness, or ineffectiveness, of this communication affect relationships? How is the communication of emotion utilized to deceive, or persuade, others? This important reference work is edited by top researchers in the field of communication and authored by a who's who in emotion and communication. Provides a comprehensive look at the role of communication in emotion Includes contributions from top researchers in the field of communications Examines how specific emotions are communicated Includes important new research on the effect of communication on relationships

Are you struggling to improve a hostile or uncomfortable environment at work, or interested in how such tension can arise? Experts in organizational psychology, management science, social psychology, and communication science show you how to implement interventions and programs to manage workplace emotion. The connection between workplace affect and relevant challenges in our society, such as diversity and technological changes, is undeniable; thus learning to harness that knowledge can revolutionize your performance in tackling workday issues. Applying major theoretical perspectives and research methodologies, this book outlines the concepts of display rules, emotional labor, work motivation, well-being, and discrete emotions. Understanding these ideas will show you how affect can promote team effectiveness, leadership, and conflict resolution. If you require a foundation for understanding workplace affect or a springboard into deeper, more interdisciplinary research, this book presents an integrative approach that is indispensable.