THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF EMOTIONAL CULTURE IN COMPANIES

Different from what many think, a company that cares about the emotions of its employees goes much beyond mere administration concern or as an instrument of forced satisfaction, like those environments that try to impose happiness thinking that happy faces indicate everything is going well.

Emotion is the foundation of employees’ feelings, and to build a healthy environment, it is necessary to have enough information to understand what motivates the employees at all levels. Within this set of information, there must be an explicit understanding of what generates the feeling of belonging and recognition at work. It is no coincidence that today organizations that are genuinely concerned about the future have persistently sought to make a good reading of the organizational environment, that is, how people behave and relate in the workplace, and to help them, they are beginning to develop mechanisms to monitor the satisfaction of their employees. From apps that record how satisfied and even how much fun people are having, to hiring specialized consultants in tracking and mapping organizational climate, or even companies developing programs aimed at continuous analysis of the satisfaction and joy of their employees. Unfortunately, however, these organizations are the minority.

Most companies pay little attention to how their employees are—or should be—feeling. They do not realize how crucial emotions are to developing an integrative culture that provides an organizational environment focused not only on productivity and quality of deliveries, but also on the well-being of their employees. This is because it has become common for people to talk about organizational culture, which affects their interior and formation, as if it symbolized corporate vision giving only attention to the company’s progress in the market, its relationship with other companies, resulting in productivity, sales, purchases, and financial health.

It is worth remembering that the customs and traditions of companies alter their progress, which can be positive or negative, changing over time. Organizational culture represents the company’s identity, which in turn is systemic, therefore organic, meaning it is always in an evolutionary process and changes over time. Therefore, it is also important to note that organizational culture involves artifacts (behavioral patterns), shared values (beliefs), and assumptions (values, truths, rules, and patterns). It may also contain visible components, which are always oriented by organizational aspects, or hidden components, which are always oriented by emotion and affective situations.

It is not surprising that organizational culture has become a concern for many organizational studies that are seeking to transform it into cognitive culture: shared cognitive values, norms, artifacts, and intellectual premises that serve as a guide for group flourishing. The focal idea of cognitive culture is to set the tone for how employees think and behave at work—whether they are customer-focused, innovative, teamwork-oriented, or competitive, individualistic, collaborative, inclusive, diversified, etc. Of course, concern for cognitive culture is undoubtedly fundamental in current times for the organization’s success. But it is only one systemic part of the whole.

This is because a company is formed by humans, who by nature are unique, exclusive, and above all, emotional beings. In this sense, it is necessary to consider another crucial aspect which I call the emotional culture of the company: shared emotional values, norms, artifacts, and affective premises that govern the emotions people have and express at work and the emotions that would be best suppressed. Although the key distinction here is between thinking versus feeling, both types of culture, cognitive and emotional, are also transmitted differently: cognitive culture tends to be transmitted verbally, while emotional culture tends to be transmitted through affection, whether considering personal and social aspects for effective human behavior; these aspects take into account issues such as: the ability to understand how others feel and relate to each other; the ability to manage emotions; the ability to manage change, adapt, and solve personal and interpersonal problems; the ability to generate positive affect and be self-motivated; and the ability for self-analysis through realistic and sincere self-feedback.

WALK-THE-TALK

Of course, communication is a fundamental factor in this, being a two-way street, active listening and understanding the meaning of what the other wants to communicate and considering the contribution in their speech is crucial in building effective communication, whether through non-verbal communication, such as body language and facial expression as well as verbal communication. Therefore, to maintain the level of engagement and a healthy environment, in which emotional culture is sought, motivation for practicing “walk-the-talk” – a term widely used in many corporate environments which, in free translation, means “walking the talk”, becomes fundamental. This means, in other words, that the basis lies in the question: Do we say what we do and do what we say? The idea then lies in the visibility position every day, bringing to employees the perception if their behavior is an example for others. Speaking what is done, and doing what is said, means maintaining coherence and creating expectations without surprises, the foundation of emotional culture.

THE DISTINCTIVE OF EMOTIONAL CULTURE

In recent decades, a very important movement has been taking place within organizations, which has to do precisely with the resurgence of the need to understand the ways in which emotions shape and affect people’s behavior at work, and this movement is called the “affective revolution.”

However, it still faces many restrictions in the corporate world, so emotional culture is rarely managed as deliberately as cognitive culture, and often it is disregarded and even ignored. Companies suffer from this gap. Perhaps because today, along with this affective movement, there is an imperative that people should be happy, and therefore we are experiencing a pandemic of happiness, where unhappiness ceases to be a real problem and begins to represent a behavioral deviation, almost always related to mental health issues. Other times it is identified as weakness, incapacity, or even illness.

Perhaps this is why employees who should show compassion (in health care, for example) become insensitive and indifferent, as people who lack a healthy dose of insecurity and fear are increasingly present, and the effects can be especially harmful in turbulent times, such as organizational restructuring, immediacy, and financial crisis.

I have noticed, especially from the pre-pandemic period until now, that emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even concrete metrics such as financial performance and absences from work. By following current empirical studies and research on the subject, it has become very evident that the impact of emotions on the level of performance of individuals in their tasks, on engagement, creativity, commitment to the company, and on how decisions are made is increasingly evident. Stimulating positive emotions is consistently associated with better performance, quality, and customer service, and this applies to all functions and sectors, and at various organizational levels. On the other side of the coin (with some specific exceptions or in the short term), negative emotions such as group hostility, sadness, fear, and related feelings lead to negative outcomes, including poor performance and high employee turnover.

It is necessary to draw attention here to the fact that when managers ignore emotional culture, they may be building a managerial blindness that prevents them from seeing a vital part of what motivates people — and organizations. They may understand its importance in theory, but still avoid emotions at work. On the other hand, leaders may have the illusion that they can influence how people think and behave at work by acting with a firm hand, incisively, but often they feel unprepared to understand and actively deal with how employees feel and express their emotions in this environment. Other times they may consider the task irrelevant or unprofessional, as if it were not part of their job, which is a great mistake.

Through my experience working in environments with executives and employees at various hierarchical levels, I have heard several testimonials from professionals reporting that their impression is that the company they work for does not pay attention to the emotions of its employees, which is a great mistake, even in those more authoritarian environments. Emotion is an intrinsic part of human life. Now, when the environment is conducive and motivates people to express what they feel in a way that encourages them to listen, understand, and consciously shape them, there is a great chance for leaders to make a difference and become much more capable of motivating their subordinates.

Therefore, in this article, I want to reflect on some of the ways in which emotional culture manifests itself at work and the impact it can have in a variety of contexts, ranging from health care and emergency care to finance, coaching, consulting, and mentoring. From this corporate experience, I also intend to suggest ways to create and maintain an emotional culture that will help your company achieve broader goals.

EXPLORING BENEATH THE SURFACE

In the book “The Secrets of the Most Beloved Companies,” Sisodia, Sheth, Wolfe, offer a very interesting introspection into the empowerment that companies achieve when they include emotions in their management principles. When conducting a more focused analysis of companies seeking to strengthen the idea of an emotional culture within the organization, it is perceived that it is present from mission statements and corporate emblems, as well as translated into everyday organizational life, clearly visible through small gestures rather than forceful declarations of feelings. For example, small acts of kindness, knowledge sharing, frank conversations, and support can indicate an emotional culture characterized by respect and compassion.

To develop an emotional culture, it is necessary to pay attention and give due consideration to the way people communicate, both in non-verbal language, such as facial expressions and body language, and also in the work environment, including verbal language, which are equally powerful. For example, if a leader routinely arrives at work appearing irritated, intentionally or not, they may end up cultivating a culture of irritation. This phenomenon, to everyone’s surprise, is quite common and is part of several studies on the quality of the work environment, which have found that many environments have become toxic precisely because they absorb the emotional mannerisms of their leaders, leading several other collaborators to feel more comfortable expressing more irritation than joy at work – on average, they reported expressing irritation three times more. Can you imagine the “cascade effect”?

Another point that potentially affects emotion is the organization, cleanliness, decoration, lighting, scent, and office furniture, as well as the way people present themselves. You may not realize it, but they almost always serve as the basis for what people outside expect or what is appropriate in emotional terms. Simple displays of events showing employees smiling at social events hanging on cubicle walls can signal a culture of joy. Signs with lists of rules and consequences for breaking them can reflect a culture of fear, for example.

Edgar Schein, known for several important works on leadership, makes it clear that the most deeply rooted elements of organizational culture are the least visible. A very present and continually explored example is the underlying premise that challenging employees among themselves brings out their best work. This is not the type of thing that managers go around announcing; sometimes they don’t even realize they are feeding into this dynamic. And yet it is felt by both leaders and employees. While it can result in healthy competition, it can also become toxic, capable and very common of creating a culture of envy, which can erode trust and undermine relationships, camaraderie, and motivation for collaboration.

EMOTIONAL CULTURES IN ACTION

With the development of functional brain imaging technologies, it became possible to correlate representations and informational processes with patterns of brain activation in a fully lucid person, and this was the great milestone of cognitive neuroscience. From there, the theme of emotion becomes the basis for numerous studies on human behavior, and it is from there that social psychologist Phil Shaver and his colleagues found that people are able to reliably distinguish far more than six emotions, in reality, today more than 135 emotions are mapped. From the most basic – joy, love, anger, fear, sadness – which is already a good start for any leader seeking to manage an emotional culture – it is necessary to understand that emotion is part of human relationships and all their aspects. Therefore, its importance. Below are some examples to illustrate how these emotions can participate in the organizational climate:

Culture of Joy: When studying this topic, I came to know the emotional environment of Vail Resorts. “Having fun” is listed as a company value. According to testimonies from people who frequented the place, they easily recognized that the resort cultivates joy among employees and helps customers have fun as well, which is very important in the hospitality business. Furthermore, as one of the highlights, the organization managed to retain top talent in an extremely competitive industry. Management tactics, special outings, celebrations, and rewards all support the emotional culture. The managers of this resort set an example of joy and prescribe it to their teams. During the workday, they distribute badges to employees when they observe them having spontaneous fun or helping colleagues.

All in service of an emotional culture that gives intuitive meaning to this. Another company that demands joy, but in a more discreet manner, is Cisco Finance. When reading interviews with employees, it is immediately noticeable the respect the company has for the emotional culture – it is clear that managers promote joy as a priority. The survey did not ask employees how they felt at work; it asked which emotions they regularly saw their colleagues express.

Very different from the norm, joy constitutes one of the strongest drivers of satisfaction and commitment of its employees to the company — serving as motivation to maintain engagement. In this case, joy has become an explicit cultural value, naming it “pause for fun.” Signaling that this was an important result to monitor — as well as productivity, creativity, and other performance elements. Cisco Finance measures joy in a much more specific way, and conducts follow-up surveys to monitor if the feeling is indeed increasing. Additionally, leaders throughout the organization support this cultural value and spare no effort to spread and encourage people to feel good. Many companies use annual employee engagement surveys to assess joy at an abstract level, often in the form of job satisfaction and commitment to the organization, but perhaps it is necessary to go beyond and listen to the essence of what their employees have to say and what they can suggest, ethically, to improve joy in the workplace. This may be the first major step in working and beginning to develop an emotional culture.

• Coexistence: One of the issues that is part of every company, but is hardly ever discussed in organizational discussions and is a priority in emotional culture — common in life, but whose name is rarely mentioned in organizations — is coexistence. In a healthy environment, organizational coexistence should be based on the degree of affection, tenderness, and compassion that employees feel and express towards each other. There are several studies that point out the importance of the quality of coexistence in the work output of its employees.

Of course, this seems very obvious, after all, an engaged environment where people respect each other brings about physical and emotional well-being on its own. Companies with strong cultures of camaraderie had lower rates of absenteeism, less emotional exhaustion, good teamwork, and satisfaction. Employees also tend to perform better, as demonstrated by the good humor and satisfaction of their internal and external colleagues, such as customers and suppliers. This is because employees whose temperament tends to be more positive receive additional encouragement for their performance, always remembering that emotion is contagious — these results show a powerful connection between emotional culture and business performance.

Analyzing a study conducted with 3,200 professionals in 17 organizations across seven sectors: biopharmaceutical, engineering, financial services, higher education, public utilities, real estate, and tourism, it is evident that in organizations where employees felt and expressed good coexistence with each other, people reported greater job satisfaction, commitment, and personal responsibility for job performance. One of the companies I analyzed and that caught my attention was Censeo Consulting Group, which deliberately fosters a culture of good coexistence. Its story begins with its co-founder and CEO, Raj Sharma, who wanted to build a company that established authentic connections with clients. In this process, he realized that this strategy, which increased client trust and the company’s impact, was also crucial for Censeo’s organizational culture.

Now the company hires people who will help sustain its culture; this means discarding some really smart people who would destroy it. Censeo also encourages employees to cultivate genuine relationships when interacting socially, both at work and outside of it. The message seems to be getting through: when asked to describe colleagues in the company, a junior analyst called them “my friends.” Employees also take it upon themselves to treat each other with compassion. They confront colleagues — even those above them in the hierarchy — if they blatantly disregard others’ feelings or frequently rebuke colleagues.

• A Culture of Trial and Error: Every organization under extreme command-and-control leadership tends to lower team morale, and the staff retention rate is directly impacted, leading to the worst possible outcome. Of course, one doesn’t need to be naive to understand that often there are important projects in which pressure and demands are intense, and the people involved need to fulfill their mission while maintaining quality and delivery deadlines, so performance largely depends on skill and management. However, at the same time, it is necessary to understand that the constant fear of being reprimanded — for making mistakes, not knowing things, challenging authority, and so on — made it harder for employees to reason well and act quickly. This leads to what in behavioral psychology is called “threat rigidity,” in other words, it represents the tendency to narrow focus in a threatening situation – which impacts excessive stress in the prefrontal cortex: it impairs executive functions, such as judgment, memory, and impulse control. In this sense, to consolidate an emotional culture, it is necessary to use classical “high-involvement” management techniques, such as empowering team members to make decisions and not punishing them for every slip-up. As a result, it makes them more confident and responsible — and less inclined to simply wait for permissions and guidance from their boss; to be more innovative, to invest in knowledge, and to create a collaborative environment. The transformation is worth it.

EMOTION CONTAMINATES

There are organizations that avoid these problems and recognize that many emotions at once end up nullifying each other. They understand that there is a reason for the emotional culture to be strong, so they are constantly monitoring to manage weak points particularly important in turbulent, stressful, or challenging situations. And the most appropriate way to do this is to create a camaraderie environment avoiding criticisms and judgments of specific events so as not to make them endemic in the workplace, after all, emotion contaminates the environment, research on emotional contagion shows that people “catch” feelings from others.

Like any other emotion, human relationships can lead to various outcomes, depending on what they are associated with. In a study conducted at a medical center, it was possible to see that the emotional culture was largely defined by anxiety and anger. In this center, there was a “points system” based on punishments that reinforced anxiety: “If you miss work because you’re sick, you get a point,” wrote one employee. “If you arrive a minute late, you get another point.

We felt like we were part of the department’s liabilities, as disposable as gauze.” Profuse anxiety led to many negative outcomes, including poor financial performance, emotional burnout, and low job satisfaction rates. However, when the emotional culture was properly addressed and implemented, it became evident from the results achieved that what had a strong culture of anxiety became associated with mutual respect among colleagues, with this, the performance and attitudes of the employees changed drastically and anxiety reached levels never experienced before. Note that the emotional culture was implemented under the argument of respect, which essentially served as an antidote to the culture of anxiety. It reduced the negative impact on the bottom line — specifically on gross profit margin — by offsetting the harmful effects on employee attitudes. Although they expressed a lot of anxiety and felt surrounded by it, they knew that their colleagues cared about them and helped them deal with it.

CREATING AN EMOTIONAL CULTURE

To cultivate a balanced emotional culture without being imposing, without falling into the trap of excess, it is necessary to make people feel that their emotions are valued by the organization and the team — focusing on creating a dynamic of self-analysis so that they can understand their own feelings. There are three efficient methods in which I can leave you with a tip, they are:

Channel what they already feel: Some employees will experience desired emotions quite naturally. This can happen in isolated moments of compassion and gratitude, for example. When these feelings surface regularly, it’s a sign that you’re developing the culture you want. If your employees have them periodically and need help sustaining them, you can try incorporating some gentle nudges during the workday. You might schedule some time for meditation, for example, or offer training sessions that teach breathing, relaxation, or laughter techniques; or create a compliment board, where people can post kind words about colleagues. There are plenty of examples that help brighten the atmosphere while also demonstrating affection and respect for people.

But what can you do about toxic emotions in the culture you’re striving for? How do you discourage them when they already exist? In these cases, the one thing you can’t do is try to ignore and suppress these feelings present in the environment. This is not only ineffective but can be destructive – repressed emotions will later emerge in counterproductive and much more devastating ways. In this case, let’s go back to the beginning of this article: Communication. Much of the problems stem from a lack of dialogue between people. The lack of dialogue is one of the issues that cause most hallucinations – “guesses.” That’s why it’s important to listen to employees when they express their concerns so they feel heard.

This doesn’t mean you should encourage venting, but rather identify through dialogue the origin of emotions that cause problems. It’s worth noting here the caveat that for behavioral psychology, prolonged venting can lead to negative outcomes as well as motivate criticism and judgments, which are almost always biased. The best option is to help employees reflect on situations constructively. For example, disappointment – which can deteriorate their behavior and performance, when addressed more efficiently through cognitive reappraisal, making the employee realize that their view is one of the possibilities and that no matter how right they think they are, there may be other issues that are not being considered regarding the actions of others, helps to consider other plausible motivations for their colleagues’ behavior, this will make them less prone to fixate on negative explanations that would only increase this feeling and at the same time motivate dialogue for a clear and objective understanding between the parties.

Be an example of the emotions you want to cultivate: A long line of research on emotional contagion shows that people in groups “absorb” feelings from others through behavioral imitation and subsequent changes in brain function (mirror neurons). If you regularly enter a room smiling with a lot of energy, you are much more likely to create a culture of joy than if you display a neutral expression. Your employees will smile back, and the smile will start to be spontaneous. This is because instinctively the smile is a motivator to build introspectively good thoughts, after all, the smile can directly interfere with people’s feelings. It’s a powerful expression to calm people down and minimize negative emotions. However, negative feelings also spread quickly. If you often express frustration, that emotion will infect your team members and their team members, and it will affect the entire organization. Before you know it, you’ve created a culture of frustration. So, consciously be a model of the emotions you want to cultivate in your company. Some organizations go a step further and explicitly ask employees to spread certain emotions. “Inspire happiness with contagious enthusiasm.”

“Admit your joy and distribute it.”: It may seem trivial and even a bit childish, but it works. You know that saying that if you insist on your lie, it becomes the truth! Well, in life, that can be a big trap, but not for emotions. Pretending a positive emotion helps to feel it. In other words, it’s like self-infecting with something that will generate pleasure, and pleasure is what the brain doesn’t spare effort to feel. Moreover, if the people around you don’t experience the desired emotion at a certain moment, they can still help maintain the emotional culture of your organization.

This is because, at work, people express emotions both spontaneously and strategically. Research in social psychology has long shown that individuals tend to conform to the norms of emotional expression of a particular group, imitating others because of the desire to be esteemed, belong, and be accepted. Thus, employees in a strong emotional culture who would not feel or express the valued emotion under other conditions will begin to demonstrate it—even if their initial motivation is to comply with the culture rather than internalize it. This benefits the organization, not only the individuals seeking to thrive in it. Studies in social psychology on group rituals have found that strategic emotional expression facilitated group cohesion by subjugating individual feelings and synchronizing interpersonal behavior.

Here’s an important note to add to “another side of emotional culture” that I will discuss below. Maintaining the appropriate culture sometimes involves disregarding what one is truly feeling. Through “superficial representation,” employees may display the valued emotion even without wanting to feel it. But, beware! Superficial representation is not a long-term solution. Research shows it can lead to emotional exhaustion—particularly in the absence of any outlet for authentic emotions. A good way to cultivate the desired emotion is through “deep representation.” With this technique, people make a concentrated effort to feel a certain way, and then suddenly, they do. Imagine a scenario where an employee at an engineering company has a family emergency and requests a week off at the peak of the project’s completion. Although their boss’s initial thought might be, “No—right now—no way!”, they could engage in deep representation to turn their justifiable panic into genuine concern and caring for the well-being and quality of life of their employee. By making an effort to be empathetic, saying “Of course, at this important moment, you should be with your family!” and using the same facial expressions, body language, and tone of voice they would use when actually feeling these emotions, they could induce themselves to feel as if it were real. They would also be modeling desired behavior for the subordinate and the rest of the team.

Fortunately, all these ways of creating an emotional culture—whether they involve actually feeling the emotion or simply representing it—can reinforce each other and strengthen cultural norms. People don’t have to pretend forever. Those who begin to express an emotion driven by the desire to fit in will begin to feel it actually thanks to emotional contagion. They will also receive positive reinforcement for complying with the norms, making them more likely to demonstrate the emotion again.

Of course, the culture will be much stronger and more likely to last if the person truly believes in the values and premises behind it. Someone who doesn’t feel comfortable with an organization’s emotional culture and has to pretend in order to succeed would probably be better off in a different work environment. Companies often have more than one emotional culture, so another unit or department could be excellent choices. But if the culture is homogeneous, the employee may want to leave the company altogether.

ANOTHER SIDE OF EMOTIONAL CULTURE

It is also clear that any excess of actions in the pursuit of personal, social, and environmental changes without proper strategic structuring, monitoring, and time, leads to lack of coherence and therefore lacks consistency, and therefore has a short life. Consistency requires us to be coherent in all our interactions all the time; it validates the individual’s coherence, especially when part of a team. Thus, poorly planned actions to implement an emotional culture can make the environment toxic. On the interpersonal level, emotional culture is related to socially intelligent vision that encompasses the ability to be aware of the emotions, feelings, and needs of others and to establish and maintain cooperative, constructive, and mutually satisfactory relationships. That’s why it’s important to understand that even the continuous pursuit of positive emotions can have unintended side effects if we let their influence dominate others without supervision and clarity of what is sought within the corporate environment. Let’s look at some key points to reflect on:

• Transparency: Absolute emotional culture, leading to continuous joy and fun, can hinder work. In a culture that preaches full emotional balance, where everyone feels like family, employees may have difficulty having frank conversations about problems. To quote someone I interviewed: “People don’t want to talk about conflicts because they don’t want to alter emotions.”

• Reality vision: When emotional culture becomes imperative, positive emotion is present as a rule, not as a search for balance. In this sense, the environment tends to produce an excess of optimism. Positive emotions tend to mask critical thinking, similarly minimizing heated debates, which are often necessary. It can also impair the systemic view of issues and decisions; in fact, uncontrolled positive emotion tends to lead people to see much more of the positives than the realistic, as commonly said, seeing life only in a positive light, and that’s not good.

• Interpersonal relationships: In addition, an excess of positive emotions hinders the cultivation of more meaningful and lasting relationships because very positive people cannot see the other person in full, their virtues, differences, which is why optimistic people suffer much more from disappointments in their relationships in the medium term. This will prevent recognizing desires and conditions for desires. In other words, what I mean is that in an environment where positive emotion is imperative, you are conditioning people to present themselves as if they were complete (perfect), without missing parts (imperfect).

• Professional career: It can also be said that people who are always emotionally positive tend to hinder the development of their own careers, as they minimize their systemic view and reduce the critical ability to analyze other possibilities. They tend to justify more and therefore rely more on chance. Always remembering that emotions are a fundamental part of our critical thinking, finding this conscious balance becomes more open to understanding the world.

• Otherness: One of the fundamental points that must be observed very carefully is the impact on people’s uniqueness. When you articulate an emotion for everyone, you are actually interfering with the otherness of individuals. If each person has their subjective way of being, observing, and feeling the world, they also have their way of interpreting the world and everything in it, and this is what makes each person unique. Human growth lies in differences, in what affects another and vice versa, making each experience a significant value of the necessary knowledge for a better personal and social life. Emotional imperatives strip away the essence of differences, becoming statutory. When you standardize an emotional pattern in an environment, you are actually subtracting the ability of each person to present not only their best but also their differences. When we standardize people in companies, clear implications will arise in their productivity, with a decline in creative, entrepreneurial, and innovative actions. Fundamentally critical analyses are repressed. Remember that people contained in positivist environments tend to get comfortable, stay in that state, and whether consciously or unconsciously, they will do little to change. You remove participatory competence with diversity and start to create a culture of consent.

• Being an Object: Poorly managed emotional cultures can turn the employee into an object, distancing them from others because there is no longer space for differences, which when present are discarded without giving them a chance to recognize the value of differences and grow with the diversity of being. Representing the lack of independence proposed by the very need to be human. Independence is the specific condition of differentiating oneself from others but never distancing oneself from others; independence is the human condition to be able to make one’s own decisions. It is understanding that you are not an object of satisfaction and that the world should not govern over you. Therefore, distance causes suffering, but differentiation does not, since it stems from your own construction as a being. It even allows for not only being together but also being collective, more collaborative, and seeking common goals.

• The Importance of Emotions: The culture of emotion can hinder the recognition and importance of other emotions that exist in your own reasoning. Being aware that emotions such as anguish, regret, guilt, disappointment, despair, disgust, stress, frustration, indignation, anger, fear, disgust, oppression, concern, anger, resentment, boredom, sadness, shame, among others, have their value and importance in our lives and should not be fully suppressed since they are representations of who we are, and this recognition is a determining factor that drives each of us forward in life. Without them, life can become dull, flavorless. Being able to reflect on one’s own emotion allows understanding one’s own affections, relationships with the world, and everything that needs to change so that we can find our own joy in living.

• Identity: When the culture of emotion is imperative, neither you nor others are able to recognize yourself in the unique way you would like to be recognized, in the place and conception where you would like this recognition to exist. This recognition is what makes up one’s identity. What you will use to present yourself is the result of learning in relationships with the world, where you gradually learn what others think of you and learn about everything you are allowed to use the world to define yourself. Often, the culture of emotion presupposes a certain adequacy and alignment between what we think of ourselves and what the social world authorizes us as a definition of ourselves and, therefore, linking one’s own emotion to the permanent state of control in order to produce more is to link one’s own emotion to a bag that will not allow itself to be filled no matter how competent, effective, and disposed you are. Here is another way to become a victim of oneself.

IMPLEMENTATION MATTERS AT ALL LEVELS

As seen so far, implementing emotional culture requires various challenges that need to be planned, studied, and properly followed up, but above all, it is necessary to listen to all employees, at all levels of the company. Because there are so many other aspects of organizational culture that will be impacted. Emotional culture must then be supported at all levels of the organization. It should be implemented respecting people and their time. Additionally, metrics capable of assessing employee satisfaction while simultaneously measuring productivity qualitatively and quantitatively must be part of the process.

Another fundamental point is the role of senior management in driving it forward. But, for this, it is necessary to know how to distinguish between what it means to be a manager and what it means to be a leader, sometimes confused as synonyms instead of necessary and indispensable complements. John Kotter, a professor of Leadership at Harvard Business School, applies a definition that clearly delineates the different facets between manager and leader based on what he considers their three main objectives: deciding what needs to be done, creating a network of people to do it, and ensuring that it gets done.

In the order of these objectives, the manager’s role involves dealing with complexity, that is, planning and budgeting, organizing and allocating resources, and monitoring and troubleshooting. On the other hand, the leader’s role involves dealing with change, in the same sequence, establishing a direction/vision, aligning people with purpose, motivating, and inspiring. With each role clearly defined, the management of emotional culture in relation to employees is mainly supported by the leader’s role and the culture they promote. A good leader needs to have self-awareness in order to lead. Leaders often have little awareness of how much influence they have in creating an emotional culture. Furthermore, it will only be successful if examples are set.

Each leader must take responsibility for contributing to the construction of an emotionally healthy environment. Do not underestimate the importance of setting a daily example. Grandiose and symbolic emotional gestures are powerful, but only if they align with daily behavior. Senior executives can also model an emotional culture through organizational practices that should be present even in “compassionate dismissal”, common in companies that develop a strong culture that values quality interaction in daily life.

Although senior management sets the first example and establishes formal rules, middle-level managers and frontline supervisors ensure that emotional values are practiced consistently by others. Due to the fact that the greatest influence on employees is their immediate boss, the suggestions that apply to senior executives also apply to managers. They must also ensure that the emotions they express at work reflect the chosen culture and must explicitly talk about what is expected of employees.

It is also important to establish the connection between emotional culture and operations and processes, including performance management systems. The physical environment of an organization can send signals—subtle or intense—about which feelings employees express or should express at work. Decades of research in behavioral and social psychology demonstrate the importance of organizational culture, and yet most of these focus on the cognitive component.

As demonstrated, organizations also have their emotional identity, and managers must monitor it closely to motivate their teams to achieve their goals. Emotional culture is shaped by how all employees—from top management to frontline staff—behave themselves every day. But it is up to senior leaders to establish which emotions will help the organization thrive, set an example of these emotions, and reward others for doing the same. Consistency demands coherence in all our interactions all the time; it validates the individual’s coherence, especially when in a leadership position. Thus, doing what one says and saying what one does every day, all the time, being coherent and consistent, allows for the establishment of a trusting environment, an environment of emotional culture.

By effectively managing emotional culture, personal, social, and environmental changes will be clear, and the leader will be able to deal with increasingly mutable, complex, uncertain, and demanding business environments realistically and flexibly, solving problems and making decisions with their teams with the emotional and social security necessary for each individual to fully practice their true potential. Companies that care about the emotions of their employees have much to gain.

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THANK YOU FOR READING AND SEEING MARCELLO DE SOUZA IN ANOTHER EXCLUSIVE PUBLICATION ABOUT HUMAN BEHAVIOR

Hello, I’m Marcello de Souza! I started my career in 1997 as a leader and manager in a large company in the IT and Telecommunications market. Since then, I have participated in important projects of structuring, implementation, and optimization of telecommunications networks in Brazil. Restless and passionate about behavioral and social psychology. In 2008, I decided to delve into the universe of the human mind.

Since then, I have become a professional passionate about deciphering the secrets of human behavior and catalyzing positive changes in individuals and organizations. Doctor in Social Psychology, with over 25 years of experience in Cognitive Behavioral and Human Organizational Development. With a wide-ranging career, I highlight my role as:

– Master Senior Coach and Trainer: Guiding my clients in the pursuit of goals and personal and professional development, achieving extraordinary results.

– Chief Happiness Officer (CHO): Fostering an organizational culture of happiness and well-being, boosting productivity and employee engagement.

– Expert in Language and Behavioral Development: Enhancing communication and self-awareness skills, empowering individuals to face challenges with resilience.

– Cognitive Behavioral Therapist: Using cutting-edge cognitive-behavioral therapy to help overcome obstacles and achieve a balanced mind.

– Speaker, Professor, Writer, and Researcher: Sharing valuable knowledge and ideas in events, training, and publications to inspire positive changes.

– Consultant and Mentor: Leveraging my experience in leadership and project management to identify growth opportunities and propose personalized strategies.

My solid academic background includes four postgraduates and a doctorate in Social Psychology, along with international certifications in Management, Leadership, and Cognitive Behavioral Development. My contributions in the field are widely recognized in hundreds of classes, training sessions, conferences, and published articles.

Co-author of the book “The Secret of Coaching” and author of “The Map Is Not the Territory, the Territory Is You” and “The Diet Society” (the first of a trilogy on human behavior in contemporaneity – 05/2024).

Allow me to be your companion on this journey of self-discovery and success. Together, we will unravel a universe of behavioral possibilities and achieve extraordinary results.

By the way, I invite you to join my network. As a lover of behavioral psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience, I have created my YouTube channel to share my passion for cognitive behavioral development with more people.

Please note that all data and content in this article or video are exclusive, written, and reviewed by Marcello de Souza based on proven philosophical concepts and scientific studies to ensure that the best possible content reaches you.

Don’t forget to follow Marcello de Souza on other social media platforms and join the VIP list to receive exclusive articles weekly by email.

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