May Prof Barsade, Pioneering Researcher of Emotions at Work, RIP

Professor Sigal Barsade touched thousands of lives,

including the students she taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, the audience of her talks such as this one on All You Need is Love At Work, the leaders at the organizations where she engaged as a speaker or consultant and their teams, the readers of her articles on emotional culture, emotional intelligence, emotion contagion, and more. In her talk All You Need is Love At Work, she shared that love in the workplace increases employee retention, happiness, the bottom-line, and improved patients/customers outcomes and satisfaction of the family members of the patients at a long-term care facility. She also shared her groundbreaking research on companionate love, how emotional contagion fosters positive or negative results in the different organizations across various sectors, and why appropriate affection and emotion at work might be the key to creating a much-loved workplace.

In her articles on emotional culture such as this one on Harvard Business Review, she showed that an emotional culture defined by anxiety and anger with a punishment-based “point system” led to negative outcomes, including poor financial performance, burnout, and low job satisfaction. She also shared three effective methods for cultivating a particular emotional culture: 1. Incorporate gentle nudges during the workday: provide mindfulness apps on people’s work devices to remind them to breathe, relax or laugh and encourage positive emotions; listen when employees express their concerns and help them think about situations in a more constructive way; 2. Model the emotions you want to cultivate, and pay attention to body language and facial expressions besides the words you say; 3 deep acting - make a focused effort to feel a certain way. For example, engage in deep acting to change our immediate feeling of panic into genuine caring when an employee has a family emergency and requests a week off work during a busy season.

Research by other social scientists supports Prof. Barsade’s research findings. In another article on HBS, two social scientists suggest that burnout is not just related to exhaustion, but also loneliness at work. Loneliness is resulted from lacking caring relationships. The problem got worse during the pandemic since many people do remote work and have fewer chances for spontaneous social interactions and expressing care and building relationships. We have to put on intentional efforts to care about others and express care. A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that the most popular courses at top business schools in the U.S. include those that teach students how to be happy at work at Harvard Business School, “Touchy Feely” interpersonal dynamics at Stanford, and mastering influence and persuasion at Yale School of Management, the soft skills important for building meaningful relationships with ourselves and others.