Musings from the EI Consortium Conference - December 2009

Dr. Ben Palmer, fresh back from the EI Consortium Conference in Boston, offers insights gleaned on affective cultures in organisations. With the commonly held view that heterogeneous teams (experiences, competencies, gender, culture, thinking preferences) equate to higher levels of top team performance overall, new research indicates that in terms of affect, the greater the similarities within the team, the greater individuals will get along…and perform.

For full commentary please see below and to download refer to the attached document.

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Last week I attended the bi annual conference for the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Harvard in Boston. It was a really great meeting and I thought I’d provide a quick snap shot of it. Each meeting commences with a high calibre speaker from an adjacent field who presents interesting new research, to drive discussion and research ideas for emotional intelligence. This year Professor Sigal Barsade from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania spoke on her research into Affective Cultures in organisations. As she defines it, “affective culture consists of a configuration of emotions whose expression is either encouraged or discouraged based on what is perceived to be most valuable to group functioning”. For example, the Body Shop encourages the expression of a multiplicity of emotions in their employees – from affection and joy to stress, sadness and fear – as a purposeful way of defining the organisation’s culture. Similarly, South West Airlines encourages “fun” as a purposeful way of defining its culture and customer experience. Funeral parlours explicitly encourage the expression of calmness and discourage displays of grief amongst funeral directors – for reasons that I hope are obvious to us all.

Some affective cultures are explicitly developed, maintained and discussed, whiles others (I would guess the majority, including our own at Genos), are more implicit and unconsciously developed, maintained and discussed. In the meeting we discussed the fact that all organised groups of people, particularly those in organisations, have an affective culture, and that even the most explicitly defined most probably have an unconscious part to it that is both helpful and unhelpful. At Genos our values are Generosity of Sprit, Kindness and Care. Like most companies we have explored the mindset and behaviours that should accompany these values. The challenge the Consortium meeting put to me was to more explicitly explore with the team, our customers and suppliers, the types of emotions that would support these values and be most valuable to Genos group functioning.

On this latter point (emotions that are most valuable to group functioning), Professor Barsade expanded her discussion with us by introducing her findings on affective cultural diversity and top management team performance, the question being what is best – affective diversity or affective cultural homogeneity? Sigal has studied this question using trait positive affect, which by definition is a person’s tendency toward having pleasant emotional engagement with, or appraisal of, his or her environment. In contrast to those low in trait positive affect, individual’s high in trait positive affectivity are observed to be in a good mood more often and, as a result, attend to the positive aspects of their environment in ways that are congruent with that positive mood.

Unlike demographic research on top management teams that has shown that typically more demographically diverse top teams perform better than those that are homogenous (i.e., different educational/occupational backgrounds, skill sets and experiences); Sigal’s research has found that the more similar the team are in trait positive affect the better they get along and perform. In other words greater affective fit works better than affective diversity in top management teams. We’ve spent the year looking at levels of motivational fit (defined as the degree of alignment between what you are motivated by and what you experience at work), and are similarly finding greater fit leads to greater performance and better employee outcomes.

Well this concludes a brief summary of some of the more interesting points from the Consortium meeting. Professor Basarde left us with peer reviewed papers on her presentation and any of you who would like a copy of these can email Rebekka who will gladly pass them onto you. On that note, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a merry Christmas and Happy New Year, I look forward to connecting with you in 2010.

Best wishes

Ben