This article is about how our emotions play into the workplace, whether it happens to be your emotions during a presentation, when pitching an idea, etc. But it also says that 1. emotion gets our attention, 2. emotion dictate actions, 3. emotions drive performance, 4. emotions are highly infectious, and much more.
I chose this article because I am a senior and am starting to think about getting my first real job. Since I´ve never had a ¨real¨ job before I don´t know quite what to expect. I hope to be a Spanish interpreter, so I could work in many settings, but I of course think of settings that you would see on television. Do you ever notice how dramatic and emotional things can be during a workplace episode? Think about shows like Criminal Minds, emotions are heated everywhere. Obviously life isn´t usually that exciting everyday, but think about it...how do you act when you are working? How are your emotions on any given normal day?
Do you remember a specific time where there was a really good or bad day and your emotions got the best of you at work? What did you do about it afterwards?
Here is the link, it´s fairly short, but I just wanted to ask some of those questions to get the ball rolling...www.gbj.com/content.cfm?action=story&WikiID=8086. The article is from the Gwinnett Business Journal from January 2010.
I chose this article because I am a senior and am starting to think about getting my first real job. Since I´ve never had a ¨real¨ job before I don´t know quite what to expect. I hope to be a Spanish interpreter, so I could work in many settings, but I of course think of settings that you would see on television. Do you ever notice how dramatic and emotional things can be during a workplace episode? Think about shows like Criminal Minds, emotions are heated everywhere. Obviously life isn´t usually that exciting everyday, but think about it...how do you act when you are working? How are your emotions on any given normal day?
Do you remember a specific time where there was a really good or bad day and your emotions got the best of you at work? What did you do about it afterwards?
Here is the link, it´s fairly short, but I just wanted to ask some of those questions to get the ball rolling...www.gbj.com/content.cfm?action=story&WikiID=8086. The article is from the Gwinnett Business Journal from January 2010.
This reminded me of how employers used to largely disregard personality, attitudes, and emotions while studying worker productivity – they had mainly focused on the situational context. In Organizational Psychology, as in many other Psych courses, we have read about the Hawthorne Studies, in which it was shown that simply observing workers has an effect on productivity - how they feel has a direct effect on their productivity.
As much as we would sometimes like to disregard the emotional component of our lives to better deal with problems and work, emotions will always be intertwined in our being. As interesting as philosophical discussions about human nature sometimes may be, I believe research in BioPsychology provides a greater level of depth and understanding. For this knowledge there can be no substitute found within philosophical discussion.
I would have to agree with the “Emotions Count” article. Emotions play a critical role in almost everything we do. Even when we are making “rational” decisions, we may often have a variety of emotional factors at play in our subconscious – factors that greatly influence our motivation and perception of situations.
In the original article it also mentioned that “emotions drive performance.” The author reports that having a positive attitude helps one think with greater mental agility, and that having a negative attitude increases cortisol levels and impairs mental processes. I have heard this information before, and I’m sure there is plenty of research to support it, but I am wondering if this necessarily implies that all workers will have lower quality performance when they have a negative attitude. Once again, I would like to bring up my experience working in a factory. While there are plenty of things I need to be mentally aware of, the job is really not that mentally challenging, and I think I have sometimes found myself work the best when I am in a bad mood. I think a pessimistic attitude may actually help certain people anticipate potential problems that arise and take more effective preventative action than those who are generally optimistic. I also wonder if stress, negativity, and cortisol only impair certain types of mental agility and leave other areas of thought largely uninfluenced. I have not yet read many articles about this subject, but I suppose there is probably a lot of information about this out there, within an article somewhere. In any case, cortisol levels are clearly something we want to avoid and I think reducing stress and negative thoughts is surely something to be desired.