How to Shape a Positive Emotional Culture at Work
We do not come into this world with a pre-set collection of emotions. Instead, we develop and learn to experience them as we grow and accumulate life experiences. Our emotions serve as a means of expressing ourselves, as well as influencing others.
Society plays a significant role in shaping human emotions through a life-long learning process that starts in the family. It models our values, beliefs, and attitudes that give content and shape to our emotions, teaching us patterns to make them controllable and culturally acceptable.
However, we are also partly responsible for our emotional makeup since we make our own decisions, choose our beliefs, and form our attitudes. Therefore, our emotional response is a product of how we have been and are modified intrinsically and extrinsically.
What Shapes Our Emotions
Several individual factors shape our emotions, such as our genes, brain physiology, upbringing, learned and impersonated behavioral patterns, making us emotionally rich and complex. Emotions can be taught, tempered, and balanced, and shaped to change intensity and frequency.
Emotions and Interpersonal Relationships
Science suggests that emotional expressions are crucial to the development and regulation of interpersonal relationships. By using words, facial expressions, our tone of voice, we express ourselves and also influence others by triggering their emotional response.
Although emotions can be controlled, sometimes they control us unconsciously, triggered by the stimuli that come from the environment. Emotional expressions are crucial to the development and regulation of interpersonal relationships, and emotional interactions at work significantly influence performance and relationships.
Positive Emotional Culture and Well-being
Managing emotions effectively in the workplace requires understanding and adequate skills. Leadership should pay attention to whether employees’ emotional interactions promote health, well-being, high performance, and motivation. Building a positive emotional culture as part of a wider organisational culture framework can streamline emotions and create a conducive work environment.
Words play an essential role in emotional interactions in the organization. Using words that cause a positive emotional response can lead to positive interactions and a stronger influence on people’s performance, as Sigmund Freud once said: “Civilisation began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.”
