Case Incident 1 - Is It Okay to Cry at Work?

1. What factors do you think make some organizations ineffective at managing emotions?

Firstly, I think that the complex human thinking is one of the factors that make the organizations hard to manage the emotions. Every person has his or her own emotions. Although in a same situation, they may not act in the same way. Thus, the organizations face difficulties when they are dealing with their employees. This problem is even becoming worse when the organisation is very large and contains many employees from different background. Furthermore, the authority of an organisation sometimes finds out they themselves cannot control their own emotions as well.

Besides, due to the business culture and etiquette which are still remain poorly in some of the organisations, it becomes a problem for the organisations to manage the emotions effectively. Some of the organisations have not practised the suitable business culture. For example, they will yell and shout at the employees when things go wrong just like the second case mentioned. This shows that some of the organisations still do not concern to manage the emotions effectively.

Moreover, emotions are automatic physiological responses to the environment. It will be very hard for one to control his or her emotions by hiding their true feelings within their heart. It revealed automatically. Even people that are trying to cover their true emotions can be discovered from their facial expression. Thus, this is not the fault that the organisations cannot manage the emotions effectively. This is because it is not an easy work to control the emotions of whole organisations.

2. Do you think the strategic use and display of emotions serve to protect employees, or does covering your true emotions at work lead to more problems than it solves?

By covering one's emotions can sometimes ensure a work to be done perfectly. However, people that are always covering their own emotions will always find themselves in a stressful situation and they are very hard to communicate with others. Consequently, that kind of people can be easily frustrated and lose their confidence in their jobs. Problems such as unsatisfied towards the jobs, depression, low job performance and so on will then arise. At the end, it creates more problems than what it wants to solve at first.

Through the strategic use and display of emotions, the employees can express their emotions in a manner way. They have to know the ways to control their emotions even though they are working in a nasty situation. After that, they can voice up the problems that they are facing to the higher authority. In my opinion, this is even better than hiding the true emotion because the whole organisations can look into the problems deeply and try to come out with a solution.

3. Have you ever worked where emotions were used as part of a management style? Describe the advantages and disadvantages