Beyond Emotional Intelligence: Emotional Competence in the - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Beyond Emotional Intelligence: Emotional Competence in the Workplace

• S. Colby Peters, PhD, LCSW

CEO, Human Systems

Objectives

• Compare and contrast emotional intelligence and

emotional competence

• Develop an understanding of emotional competence

and its uses on the individual, relational, and

• rganizational levels
• Start exploring how to use emotional competence to

prevent burnout, improve relationships, and improve

• rganizational functioning

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New Ways to Look at Emotions

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Eckhart’s Emotional Expressions

From The Nature of Things Website at http://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/the-seven-universal- emotions-we-wear-on-our-face

Anger Fear Disgust Happiness Sadness Surprise Contempt

Culturally Determined

• Facial expressions are cultural, not universal
• What we think of as “basic” emotions do not have

unique “fingerprints” and are subjective

• According to research, no emotion has been proven to

be universal

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Socially situated

• As socially situated in organizations: within person vs.

between people

• Emotions can be influenced or elicited by cues in the

environment

• Routines and social

structures can have regulating effect on emotions

• “Emotional contagion” or

“emotional pollution”

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Integrated with the physical body

• Certain movements/gestures can produce positive or

negative affect, help you learn better

• Your physical structure greatly influences how you see

and interact with the world

• Preventing movement and gesturing makes it harder for

you to express emotions and understand others’ emotions

• Physical cues, such as hunger or pain, are directly tied

to emotion

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Integrated throughout the brain

• Mounting evidence against the theory of “primal” vs.

“evolved” brain, where emotions are in the “primal” part and cognition is in the “evolved” part

• No specific “emotion” area
• Every decision we make is infused with affect – no such

thing as the “rational” part of the brain

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We need our emotions to make decisions

• Our thinking is not divided into “rational” and

“emotive”

• Damasio (1994) study on patients with frontal lobe

damage

• The importance of the “gut feeling”
• Emotions help us decide what is relevant or not; what is

worth thinking about or not

• Emotions facilitate decision-making

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How We Make Emotions

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Your body budget

• Your brain/body constantly keeps track of

physiological changes – heart rate, temperature, blood pressure, etc.

• The overriding goal is maximum efficiency – to match

your body’s physiological response to demands on your body – this is your “body budget”

• When your body budget matches with requirements, you

feel good

• When your body budget is not matching up with what is

required, you feel bad

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What is the difference between affect and emotion?

• Affect is a combination of valence and arousal
• Valence: pleasant/unpleasant spectrum
• Arousal: calmness/agitation spectrum
• Emotion is the cognitive interpretation of affect

and depends a lot on the situation – it is the meaning and prescriptive action

13 Pleasant Valence, High Arousal Elated, Thrilled Pleasant Valence, Mid Arousal Gratified, pleased Pleasant Valence, Low Arousal Calm, serene Unpleasant Valence, High Arousal Upset, Distressed Unpleasant Valence, Mid Arousal Miserable, Displeased Unpleasant Valence, Low Arousal Lethargic, Depressed

Affective circumplex

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How do we experience the world?

Prediction Sensory Input

100% 0%

Daydreaming Memory Imagination Predictions that match sensory input Learning Autism Meditative states

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How are emotions made?

• Our brain/body is constantly budgeting
• World experience based on prediction and/or sensory input
• We receive physiological cues that help us determine what our

affect is

• Predictive state  interpret events based on past

experiences

• Sensory state  interpret events based on current events
• We assign an emotion to our affect and behave accordingly

How We Use Emotions

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How we use emotions

• Making meaning of our sensations –

categorizing how you feel physically in order to understand the cause

• Prescribing action – helps you know what to do
• Physical regulation – tells your body how to

respond

• Emotion communication
• Social influence

Emotions in Professional Settings

Emotional Labor

• “showing interest, concern, and sympathy, while

suppressing disgust, frustration, and anxiety” according to “display rules”

• Emotion is subject to rules of the organization
• Emotion as a commodity

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Emotional dissonance – distance between display emotion and felt emotion

• Emotional labor is related to “competing selves”, or

“competing identities”

• When we are asked to take on multiple roles with

competing motives and purposes, it can contribute to burnout

• Environmental factors can contribute to this effect:

“Display rules”, risks of non-compliance, others’ reactions, social support

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Emotions and Moral Injury (“burnout”)

• Job burnout: “a state of exhaustion and emotional

depletion”

• Results from prolonged, suppressed physiological arousal
• Compassion fatigue
• Linked to turnover, increase in sick

days, low job performance

• May be made worse by:
• client emotions/negative behavior
• need for emotional labor

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Emotional Intelligence and Emotional Competence

Emotional Intelligence

• “the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ emotions,

to discriminate among them, and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions” (Salovey & Mayer, 1990)

• Emotion perception  emotion understanding 

emotion management

• Focused on changing the individual

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Emotional Competence

• The ability to express,

validate, and process emotion in context to make positive change across organizations, in relationships, and in individuals.

• Finding balance between

environmental growth/change and individual growth/change

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Emotional Competence: Individual Level

Maintaining a good, responsive body budget

• Eat well
• Exercise
• Sleep
• Human touch
• Yoga
• Reading a book or watching a good movie
• Crying
• Learning

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Emotional granularity

• The more specific you can get with your emotion word

choice, the better choice you will make with your actions

• If you don’t have the concept for an emotion, you cannot

actually experience the emotion and you can’t convey the meaning to anybody else

• Can you create your own emotion word for a specific

situation? Ex: “Conflicted longing”

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Mastering your emotions in the moment

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• Move your body
• Change location or situation
• Emotion acceptance
• Deconstruct emotion into physical sensations and recategorize
• Is your high arousal anxiety or excitement?
• Are you nervous or determined?
• Determine what is about you, and what is about somebody else
• Cultivate awe – experience something bigger than yourself (or

your organization)

• Eat something or chew gum

Self-soothing

• Differentiating between

current emotion and past emotion

• Finding a balance between:
• changing your

expectations/perceptions and

• changing your environment

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Emotional Competence: Relational Level

Validating emotions and listening skills

• Find out how they are feeling – do not assume
• Ask questions to determine source of emotion
• Validate the connection between the emotion and the

source

• Express concern, compassion, and care
• Ask guiding questions to COACH yourself or the person

to an answer

• Unless asked, DO NOT GIVE ADVICE OR OFFER

YOUR OPINION

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Receiving Social Support

• Maladaptive social support
• Recounting events and describing negative emotions
• Results in increased negative emotions and physiological

reactivity

• Adaptive social support
• Reconstruing events in a way that promotes thinking about

incident in a broader context that promotes insight and closure

• “making meaning” out of your negative experiences
• Using the generic “you”
• Results in improved emotional and physiological reactivity and

feelings of closure

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Emotional Competence: Organizational Level

Transparency and Communication

• Maximum uncertainty creates maximum unpleasant

affect, anger, and unpredictable behavior

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Climate of authenticity

• “the extent that coworkers value authentic expressions
• f emotion with each other”
• Creating a sense of psychological safety – employees

will not be rejected for being their authentic selves

• Provides a “break” from emotional labor with clients

(receiving and giving)

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Creating positive workplace culture

• How to Change an Unhealthy

Work Environment – Glenn

• D. Rolfson TedxOslo
• Create policy around respect

and positive workplace behavior

• Applies to ALL stakeholders,

including clients

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Group tool: Talking Circle

• Everybody in the circle needs to be to committed to the

process

• Talking stick/sacred object
• Facilitator talks about the object and states ground rules;

reminds people of ground rules if the rules are broken

• Only person with the object can speak
• Object is passed to the left
• Nobody can respond to a person or comment directly on

what they said

• Circle is complete when everybody has spoken

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References

• Barrett, L.F. (2017) How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing: New York.
• Boyatzis, R. (2009). Competencies as a behavioral approach to emotional intelligence. Journal of Management Development, 28, 749-

770

• Casper, A., Tremmel, S., Sonnentag, S. (2019). The power of affect: A three-wave panel study on reciprocal relationships between work

events and affect at work. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, DOI:10.1111/joop.12255

• Grandey, A.A. (2000). Emotion regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational

Health Psychology, 5, 95-110.

• Grandey, A. and Foo, S.C. (2012). Free to be you and me: A climate of authenticity alleviates burnout from emotional labor. Journal of

Occupational Health Psychology, 17, 1-14.

• Healey, M.P., Hodgkinson, G.P., Massaro, S. Can brains manage? The brain, emotion, and cognition in organizations.Individual,

Relational, and Contextual Dynamics of Emotions, Ed. Pettita, L., Hartel, C. E.J., Ashkanasay, N.M and Zerbe, W.J. Emerald Publishing Limited: Bingley, UK.

• Ishrat, A. (2018). Role of positive and negative emotions in organizational decision-making. International Journal for Research in

Engineering Application and Management. 4, pp 260 – 266.

• King, R.B. and dela Rosa, E.D. (2019). Are your emotions under your control or not? Implicit theories of emotion predict well-being via

cognitive appraisal

• Lee, D.S., et. al. (2019, January 10). When chatting about negative experiences helps – and when it hurts: Distinguishing adaptive vs.

maladaptive social support in computer-mediated communication. Emotion, advance online publication http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/emo0000555

• Li, Y. and Ashkanasey, N.M. (2018). Temporal patterns of pleasant and unpleasant affect following uncertain decision-making.

Individual, Relational, and Contextual Dynamics of Emotions, Ed. Pettita, L., Hartel, C. E.J., Ashkanasay, N.M and Zerbe, W.J. Emerald Publishing Limited: Bingley, UK.

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References

• Hochschild, A. R. The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling, 1983.
• Kraaij, V. and Garnefski, N. (2019). The behavioral emotion regulation questionnaire:

Development, psychometric properties and relationships with emotional problems and the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire. Personality and Individual Differences, 137, 56-61.

• Morris, J.A. and Feldman, D.C. (1996). The dimensions, antecedents, and

consequences of emotional labor. Academy of Management Review, 21, 986-1010.

• Popov, B., Jelic, D., Rakovic, S., and Matanovic, J. (2018). Emotions and work burnout

from the REBT perspective: A short term prospective study. Primenjena Psihologija, 11, 365-384.

• Rose, S. and Palatittiyil, G. (2018). Surviving or thriving? Enhancing emotional

resilience of social workers in their organizational settings. Journal of Social Work, https://doi.org/10.1177/1468017318793614

• The Book of Human Emotions by Tiffany Watt Smith
• 154 words from around the world defining very specific emotions
• Positive Lexicography, Dr. Tim Lomas
• https://www.drtimlomas.com/lexicography

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