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Excerpt:
The following is from the Dec. 17, 2006, edition of The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Businesses can suffer if
workers' emotions not dealt with

Mel Fugate, a business professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, might not feel the pain of the American work force, but he at least senses it.

Fugate wishes that businesses did a better job of detecting the emotions of workers and how they contribute to the work environment.

“Historically, showing emotions at work has been widely viewed as impractical and inappropriate,” Fugate says. “There is very little room for them in the type of traditional command-and-control management style.”

Yet in a study of how 141 employees in an unidentified public services organization dealt with major organizational change, Fugate and his co-authors, Arizona State University professor Angelo J. Kinicki and graduate student Spencer Harrison, found that businesses can suffer if they don't deal with employees' emotional health.

“If employees have emotional reactions and their employers don't pay attention to those reactions, they can withdraw,” Fugate says. “They are more likely to take sick days, and if their frustration continues to grow they will actually leave their jobs.”

He says that should be a wake-up call for companies. Poor morale and heavy turnover can be costly financial burdens for any company.

“There is a big problem with valuable people leaving a firm,” Fugate says. “It is a significantly under-measured cost to the organization.”

Fugate is concerned that a large percentage of companies cling to management foundations laid in the Industrial Revolution that had managers giving orders and workers following them. Work has evolved since then, yet many companies have yet to fully shed traditional management roles.

Fugate sees opportunities for managers to build better relationships with workers by watching how they react to organizational change or stress. An employee concerned about the future might not be as productive as the employee who understands why change is occurring and how it will effect him.

“Paying attention to how workers react is an important tool for any manager,” he says.

Fugate recalled that as a young worker in the health care industry he saw how workers involved in the same merger or organizational change had dramatically different emotional reactions to it. “That told me that you have consider emotions in the workplace,” he says.

“Over the past 10 or 15 years, I think we've seen a lot of progress in the psychology movement, with companies looking at positive emotions and trying to build on them,” he says. “But there still are too many managers who think emotions don't belong on the job.”

He urges all employers to monitor employee emotions during stressful times, taking that opportunity to explain opportunities and benefits of change so workers will feel more comfortable about the future. . .

Read the full story.

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