The Role of the Emotional Climate in Learning Organizations

This paper describes the research directed at the study of the role of the emotional climate in learning organizations. It becomes increasingly obvious that an emotional climate pervades every level of human interaction inside organizations. Emotionality and rationality coexist in organizational settings. This research examines how an emotional climate arises, how it evolves, how it is maintained, and what are the consequences of a given type of emotional climate. We suggest that it may deeply affect organizational dynamics such as idea-generation, creativity, adaptability to change, and facilitation or inhibition of learning processes. Hence, it ultimately influences performance. We are in the process of developing an instrument to measure the emotional climate in a learning organization. INTRODUCTION Historically, emotion has been a difficult topic for researchers. At the end of last century and beginning of this one, psychology had been dominated by irrationalists and instinctivists, therefore making emotion somehow repellent for empirical and objective research, due probably to a semantic overabundance in the description of the phenomena (Scherer, 1984). In the 1960s came the cognitive era, where emotion got rejected anyway. The human being was under the siege of very rational and logical decision-making, and emotion could only be some kind of imperfection in this well-rounded mechanism. Since the 1980s, emotion has gained some popularity again across disciplines (anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.). However, “. . . One of the major obstacles to progress in this area has been the problem of arriving at a definition and a concept of emotion acceptable to most psychologists” (Scherer, 1984:294). Most of theories in the field recognize that ‘emotion’ and ‘cognition’ are intertwined. But emotion is not simply a cognitive process (Frijda, 1988). It is actually recognized as being: “. . . a psychological construct consisting of several aspects of components: 1 Working paper. Reference of the published version: Tran, V. (1998). The role of the emotional climate in learning organisations. The Learning Organisation, 5, 99-103.