Energy And Emotion In Organizations That Learn

If current experts in the field of organizational design have it right (for example Senge, 1990), and we believe that they do, then organizations must become high-alignment/ high-autonomy environments if they are to remain viable (Smith and Saint-Onge, 1996; Smith and Sharma, 2002). Such a shift implies that it will be critical for all employees, not just its formal leaders, to take responsibility for shaping the organization and its resultant performance. In this sense employee leadership is a matter of taking personal responsibility for trying to fulfill all the various needs of the community, rather than a social-influence process emphasizing direction-setting and authority. The means by which organizations can operationalize this notion of leadership and personal responsibility for all employees have been detailed elsewhere, together with an identification of issues related to these contexts (Smith and Sharma, 2002). This paper deals specifically with a very important non-logical factor that must be addressed if this concept of leadership and personal responsibility at all levels is to be realized; namely emotion (or more typically its suppression) in the workplace. Previously published in: The Learning Organization, Volume 9, Number 5, 2002