Introduction
From a leadership perspective, emotions matter as a 21st-century skill since it helps organizations achieve a competitive advantage. According to Lau (2020), companies whose leaders have emotional intelligence can craft strategies responsible for supporting emotional work. Under such environments, such firms enjoy more supportive, productive, and energizing work environments for their employees. However, despite the benefit that emotions enable companies to gain, one must acknowledge that leaders valued employees who behaved like robots in the previous century. Under such settings, increased productivity is directly correlated to increased assembly line workers’ efficiency (Lau, 2020). The changes experienced leading to the 21st century have shown that since emotions are critical among human workers, it has become a significant skill in the modern workforce.
Emotions matter since they spread unconsciously so that when a person experiences either a negative or positive mood, the feeling resonates among those surrounding them. In other words, emotions leak out of people, and employees’ emotions leak to their colleagues and consumers, which impacts their performance and leads to moving customers down an organization’s sales (Lau, 2020).
Therefore, when leaders are aware of their inner emotions and feelings, they easily connect with their subordinates since they have a connection with their emotions and can name them. Based on 2016 research findings by Barsade and O’Neill, Lau (2020) shows that employees working in a compassion and joy culture encounter a decline in burnout and an increase in commitment. Every leader must realize that to express their emotion; they must first get in touch with how they feel. Equally important is that leaders and managers must take responsibility for expressing their emotions since they have a ripple effect on the people around them.
Therefore, for every leader and manager, increasing employee productivity relies on creating a work environment that supports their emotions, which fosters the recruitment of new employees with the ability to compete effectively. Among the strategies that can help leaders realize such recruitments is learning the emotional language, where leaders learn to name a wide range of emotions, like motivation and worry, which constitute the human experience. Furthermore, leaders must conduct check-ins to encourage employees to share their feelings (Lau, 2020). The last two strategies constitute encouraging positive emotions and practicing honest leadership. In the former, managers can entertain posting kind words habit about co-workers; in the latter, they are aware of their moods, which deliberately energizes and lifts up their spirits before interacting with their subordinates.
Theoretical Interpretation of the Case
Affective Events Theory
Based on affective events theory, a connection exists between employees’ internal influences and how they react to work-related incidents. The theory suggests that affective work behaviors are explained by how employees feel and their mood toward their job. Since humans are emotional creatures, what they do, work included, is guided by how they feel (Wang et al., 2020). Through positive induction, like uplifting employees, or negative initiation, like hassles, leaders can distinguish emotional work incidents and gain a critical psychological effect on their subordinates’ work satisfaction. The outcome of such awareness is lasting internal and external affective reactions exhibited via organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and performance (Reynolds et al., 2020). In other words, emotional labor increases when employees work in a manner that is inconsistent with their inner feelings.
Job satisfaction is responsible for mediating the association between antecedents like work-based characteristics, employee-exhibited behavior, job opportunities, workplace events, and dispositions. Further, Wang et al. (2020) show that when staff experiences uplifts or hassles in their jobs, their intention to continue or quit relies on how they feel towards their work. Moreover, such decisions are linked to employees’ moods and thoughts about job-based satisfaction. When job satisfaction levels are low, employees demonstrate their intention to quit (Reynolds et al., 2020). While aspects like extrinsic rewards significantly impact job satisfaction, an employee’s personality factor significantly contributes to their decision to quit the job in working environments where conditions are ideal. Specific work-related events, major or minor, have a cumulative impact on job satisfaction and contribute to how employees voluntarily leave their work.
Relationship between theory and the case
When leaders foster work-based components like emotional labor, autonomy, and job demands that positively impact their subordinates, they create an environment where employees consider tasks rewarding. Similarly, in working environments where tasks are dull, routine, or overwhelming, subordinates experience negative affect, and their concerns about job evaluations increase (Diaz & Rhodes, 2018). Since autonomy degree among workers impacts their intention to quit, satisfaction, and productivity, leaders must ensure to support emotional work among their employees. The significance of emotional work among leaders and managers lies in their ability to induce positive, sensitive incidents among their workers, which helps them portray influence on their employees’ performance.
With a connection between emotion and work, leaders must channel their feelings, which reflect on their behaviors and influence employees’ involvement in work, to improve subordinates’ performance. Further, since job performance and satisfaction are linked to emotion, managers must express their emotions first by getting in touch with how they feel and second by sharing with their workers. The connection between emotional work and job performance/satisfaction is critical to organizations since it helps improve productivity.
References
Barsade, S., & O’Neill, O. A. (2016). Manage your emotional culture. Harvard Business Review. Web.
Diaz L. & Rhodes R. (2018). Job satisfaction: influencing factors gender differences and improvement strategies. Nova Science Publishers. Web.
Lau, Y. (2020). Bringing emotions into the Workplace. Forbes. Web.
Reynolds Kueny C. A. Francka E. Shoes M. K. Headrick L. & Erb K. (2020). Ripple effects of supervisor counterproductive work behavior directed at the organization: using affective events theory to predict subordinates’ decisions to enact cwb. Human Performance 355–377. Web.
Wang Q. Zhang S.-hui Yang J. Feng K. Tian Y. Yang X. & Wang S. (2020). Signal game analysis on the effectiveness of coal mine safety supervision based on the affective events theory. Complexity No. 2020 (2020) Pp. 1-9 1. Web.
