When Emotions Run Too High in the Workplace

Humans are born with the ability to feel basic emotions.

Infants across cultures show similar emotions of fear, joy, anger, sadness, and surprise when exposed to the same stimuli.

This proves that many emotions are biologically built in. The human nervous system is hard-wired to produce emotions automatically in response to certain stimuli.

While the capacity for emotion is inborn, how emotions are understood, expressed, and managed is very much learned.

What triggers emotions, how strongly they are expressed, which emotions are acceptable to show, and how we interpret or label feelings are shaped by our experiences and culture.

This has significant implications for organizations.

Since the expression of emotions is learned, people always have the ability to calibrate their responses.

Everyone, regardless of background or history, is able to regulate the intensity of their emotional responses. People can interrupt their automatic reactions if and when they choose to.

When people experience a strong internal emotion, they can feed it with intensity, pause and consider the best way to express their feelings, or keep their emotions hidden. The choice is theirs.

Those people who believe that they scream or yell or have a short fuse because of their ancestry are sadly mistaken.

They may have been raised in a household where extreme emotional responses were normal, but there is nothing that requires them to overreact. Nor is it in their blood. People always have a choice and influence over how they respond.

People can practice more calculated responses, calmer replies, fewer overreactions, and more resilience to the triggers that set them off. This is insisted upon in good organizations.

When people are rewarded for becoming overly emotional, they will double down on inappropriate expression. Leaders encourage emotionality when they ignore aberrations or avoid talking about the need for team members to be “in control” of how they express their feelings.

A respectful workplace requires leaders and team members to engage each other with an appropriate level of feeling, passion, and emotionality.

There is nothing wrong with people feeling angry, sad, frustrated, or fearful. High emotion can drive passion, engagement, and commitment.

But how leaders and team members express those emotions with others must always show respect and sensitivity.

Leaders and workplaces that tolerate extreme and inappropriate emotionality get a lot more of it.

Over time, team members come to expect some colleagues to fly off the handle or sulk inappropriately.

This normalizes emotionality and undermines the ability of team members to work through disagreements, offer candid feedback, and discuss issues openly.

People become afraid of triggering strong reactions, so they remain quiet instead.

Research on the issue is clear: When emotional reactions become too intense, too frequent, and poorly regulated, teams and organizations suffer. (So do relationships and families.)

If you work in an organization that accepts, tolerates, or celebrates high emotionality, it’s time to make a change. Insist on holding the value of “respect” higher than the value of “self-expression.”