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.

The modern world is forcing us to understand emotion in order to cope with new problems such as road rage and epidemic levels of depression, as well as age-old problems such as homicide, genocide and racial tension. At the same time, scholarly research is leading us to appreciate how emotion helps us to understand and transcend our selfish interests, to connect with others, to feel what is just and moral, and not just think it, and to construct societies and cultures that govern our joint efforts. This book draws upon scholarly research to address, explain and legitimize the role that emotion plays in everyday interaction and in many of the pressing social, moral, and cultural issues that we face today.

An in-depth guide for all workers—employees, managers, and CEOs—on how to engage our emotions in the workplace to create a productive, creative, and truly workable environment. We’ve all been taught that we must suppress or avoid emotions at work, but this inevitably leads to a loss in productivity, diminished creativity, and crushing job dissatisfaction. Research shows 85 percent of us avoid communicating crucial workplace problems upward, and many of us who are employed are actively looking for a different job. What’s going on? “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 we most need—and are most often absent in the business world—for healthy, functional, and sustainable workplaces. With The Power of Emotions at Work, McLaren teaches communication and empathy skills to workers at all levels, including: How to co-create a healthy and well-balanced social environment that benefits all workers in any type of organizationHow to recognize your primary emotional role—and the roles of othersHow to support people in your organization who perform the most “emotional labor” Where to find authentic motivation and engagement in your jobHow to go from an “unintentional community” to a place of genuine belonging, and much more We all yearn to be our authentic selves at work, where we feel supported and can communicate our feelings and frustrations in a constructive way. Workplaces are “unintentional communities,” says Karla McLaren, because without access to our emotions at work, we are left without the tools we need to do our best work in a functional community. This is your resource to help you understand and engage intelligently with emotions at work—so you can help to create healthy and intentional communities where people and projects thrive.

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.

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

Radical Candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on the one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It is about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism, delivered to produce better results and help employees develop their skills and boundaries of success. Great bosses have a strong relationship with their employees, and Kim Scott Malone has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get stuff done, and understand why it matters. Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Drawing on years of first-hand experience, and distilled clearly to give actionable lessons to the reader, Radical Candor shows how to be successful while retaining your integrity and humanity. Radical Candor is the perfect handbook for those who are looking to find meaning in their job and create an environment where people both love their work, their colleagues and are motivated to strive to ever greater success.

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.

An innovative study of gender, emotion, and power, It’s Always Personal is an essential companion for everyone navigating the challenges of the contemporary workplace. How often have we heard “It’s nothing against you, it’s not personal—it’s just business”? But in fact, at work it’s never just business—it’s always personal. In this groundbreaking book, journalist and former corporate executive Anne Kreamer shows us how to get rational about our emotions, and provides the necessary new tools to flourish in an emotionally charged workplace. Combining the latest information on the intricacies of the human brain, candid stories from employees, and the surprising results of two national surveys, It’s Always Personal offers • a step-by-step guide for identifying your emotional type: Spouter, Accepter, Believer, or Solver • Emotion Management Toolkits that outline strategies to cope with specific emotionally challenging situations • vital facts that will help you understand—and handle—the six main emotional flashpoints: anger, fear, anxiety, empathy, joy, and crying • an exploration of how men and women deal with emotions differently “A stimulating read bolstered by snippets of some of the best recent work on emotional intelligence and the science of happiness.”—The Wall Street Journal “So what should be the rules and boundaries for showing how you feel while you work? That’s a question asked and answered in Anne Kreamer’s fascinating book . . . [a] look at an issue that rarely gets discussed.”—The Washington Post “Finally, someone is willing to unpack the morass of anger, anxiety, sadness, and joy that drives the workday. . . . [Kreamer] has hit the ‘It’s about time!’ button.”—Elle “[A] lively, well-researched exploration of emotions on the job.”—Oprah.com “Explores how to be true to your ‘emotional flashpoints—anger, fear, anxiety, empathy, happiness and crying’—without sabotaging your career.”—The New York Times Book Review

Authors explore application of the study of emotion in the library workplace and look at future trends in the area. Library managers will take away knowledge about how the library workplace can and should operate with consideration toward emotion, and will glean ideas for implementation with their own staff and services.