Organizational Behavior. Emotion and Personality

J. Antonakis (2003) “Why “Emotional Intelligence” does not Predict Leadership Effectiveness”, discusses the research study by Prati, Douglass, Ferarris Ammeter, and Barckley. The researcher finds that leadership behavior can explain variances ineffectiveness and possible changes in a leader’s behavior and organizational settings influenced by emotions. A final complication is that a key component of emotional communication, facial expression, may be designed by evolution to encode and decode several emotions automatically. Consequently, emotional regulation, particularly under trying situations, is a challenge for human architecture.

Social and organizational processes must therefore create many explicit norms and rules for feeling and displaying emotions, and individuals must effectively learn these multiple requirements for emotions at work to be regulated effectively.

The article Jr. Martin (2004) “Salience of Emotional Intelligence as a Core Characteristic of Being a Counselor”, finds that emotional regulation in situations has similar requirements, which are especially challenging when emotions are negative and extreme. The article develops a basis for understanding emotions and emotional regulation at multiple levels involving intraindividual information processing, personality, and dyadic processes, and group and organizational factors. We believe this multilevel perspective is needed to understand both problems and opportunities for effective emotional regulation at work.

The article states that both positive and negative emotions can be socially communicated with automatic, unintentional connectionist-based processes, creating a genuine and adaptive aspect of social interactions. Yet genuine, immediate reactions may not always serve higher-level business or societal needs or even an individual’s current goals. Thus, workers must often alter or suppress their more immediate emotional reactions using symbolic-level processes.

Consequently, issues like emotional labor, which involve work with a strong emotional regulation component, have become popular applied topics as we move to a more service-based economy. A strength of the Lord and Harvey framework is that by translating emotional labor into the interplay between various architectures, we not only gain a greater understanding of work-related emotional labor, we can also broaden our perspective to see emotional regulation as part of all intra- and interindividual self-regulatory activities.

The main similarity between the two articles is that they underline the importance of emotional intelligence and its impact on employee relations. The researchers state that response output also involves both automatic and controlled processes. Expression of emotions is subject to display rules that may involve the automatic use of well-learned social norms when in the presence of others, or when in organizational contexts, more specific organizational display rules may be used.

The use of organizational display rules generally requires the conscious suppression of response tendencies, because organizational norms are not as well practiced as social norms. Pugh also reviews evidence indicating that conscious suppression has greater costs in terms of consuming cognitive resources and creating greater stress on an individual. Emotions occur in context, and the relevant context establishes the intensity of emotions and the time parameters in which events and processes must occur to have meaning.

The main difference is that Antonakis (2003) rejects the opinion of a possibility to predict emotional intelligence in leaders while Martin et al (2004) state that the intensity and time parameters thereby encourage or limit how emotions can be perceived and regulated. For example, consider the well-discussed phenomenon of road rage. When driving, we are primed to respond quickly to internal and external signals, often before we can consciously evaluate such signals.

Emotions, being an internal signal, help us react quickly to potential danger without having to think consciously about our actions: emotions come to the surface, and we respond. For example, someone cuts in front of us when driving, slam on our brakes, and label the person with a name or respond with a gesture, all before we have had time to think carefully about the situation.

Both articles demonstrate that the positive aspect of emotions in that they cue the appropriate response and prepare the body for that response—in the example, attention to the situation and strength to slam on the brake. Martin et al (2004) state that cognitive and computer scientists who have struggled with such issues have recognized that understanding information processing and intelligent behavior often requires more than just an explication of specific proce