Why Stick to the Facts When You Can Get Personal?
Many approaches to management have discovered feelings as a resource. Organizations are meant to be full of emotion – employees are even required to be emotional. Factual arguments no longer suffice: you need to be able to speak about yourself and your feelings. In charities, religious groups, and even in a number of profit-making businesses, discussions are now freighted with messages ‘from the heart’ and expressions of deep personal concern.
This emphasis on feeling within organizations is surprising because for a long time the assumption was that the active emotional lives of an organization’s members are potentially disruptive. The most radical expression of this thesis can be found in Max Weber, who identified ‘impersonal matter-of-factness’ as the dominant attitude within organizations. The orientation towards the impersonal enables an organization to behave like a ‘machine’ that is characterized by ‘speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs’.
The understanding of organizations as impersonal systems seems justified if we take systems to be characterized above all by the fact that they include not the whole person but only some of its attributes. This marks a crucial difference between organizations in modern society and entities such as guilds or monasteries, which otherwise exhibit remarkable structural similarities. In guilds and monasteries, which were dominant in stratified societies, one could find – and still finds in their modern incarnations – an almost total inclusion of the person who provides the service. Guilds and monasteries claim to be communities and accordingly to define all the roles played by a member within the life of the community.
By contrast, compared to their historical precursors, modern organizations involve a twofold disregard. On the one hand, an organization is entitled to disregard the private needs of its members. An employee’s request for a salary increase to pay for the new house he has just built himself appears as illegitimate as his request not to be sacked because he has to provide for a large family. On the other hand, the various roles a member of an organization plays are only of interest insofar as they affect her activity within the organization. An employee of a company or a hospital is entitled to expect that the fact of her membership of the communist party, descent from nobility, or preference for polyamory will all be ignored by the organization. The development of this kind of disregard is also functionally useful for the social system because it reduces the number of ‘relevant criteria’ for the selection of new members. The system can focus on those aspects of a person that are functionally useful, such as competence, reliability, and performance.
For all that, the members of an organization still experience positive and negative feelings. After all, life inside an organization is not always an unalloyed joy. It is important to be able to vent one’s frustrations by moaning to colleagues about all the absurd demands imposed by one’s line manager. The emotions that build up within the formal structures are taken care of in informal settings. The moaning takes place in the corner of the staff kitchen, not at a conference. It thus does not threaten the formal structure – and it may actually strengthen it. The informal sphere is the place where the emotional damage caused by the organization’s formal structures is mended. As a member of an organization, you know exactly where it is appropriate to show your feelings and where it is not.
The problems that arise in this context are open to empirical observation. If a subordinate starts crying or gets angry during a conversation with a superior, this creates tension. In fact, such situations are embarrassing for both parties, because they violate the behavioural expectations which follow from the formal structures. This is as true of excessive positive emotion as it is of anger or disappointment. Organizations therefore protect themselves against the expression of emotion. An employee’s repeated emotional outbursts may be grounds for the company to try to dismiss him. Should this not be possible, the system may create specialist psychosocial care units to try to contain these outbursts and, if necessary, to isolate the emotions from the rest of the system. Experts on the emotions may thus help to restore the proper functioning of the organization.
There is no categorical reason for objecting to the formal creation of isolated areas in which the emotions that arise in the context of work can be dealt with. In particular, employees who take care of patients in hospices, hospitals, adolescent support institutions, or psychiatric institutions inevitably experience emotional reactions, some of which are intense. Because keeping a professional distance is particularly important in these lines of work, many such institutions consider it essential to deal with these emotional reactions systematically through formal supervision. However, the distinction between private roles and the professional role is not blurred by this; rather, it becomes subject to systematic reflection and – where necessary – is restored.
But when the idea of emotions as a resource leads to the demand that everyone in an organization should be all ‘touchy-feely’, problems will sooner or later arise, and certainly once the point is reached where it is possible simply to say that something has hurt one’s feelings and to use this as an argument in a discussion.
