Emotion and Bias in Organizational Decision Making

Introduction: Dual Cognitive and Emotional Roles in Decision Making

Within any organization there is a dual cognitive and emotional role in making decisions. In the 21st-century global environment, this role is accentuated and allows far less time for deliberation than ever before. Typically, decision making results from receiving stimuli, choosing from alternatives based on past and current knowledge, and then making a final choice of an action or group of actions. One way of looking at the decision-making process is that it is ingrained within the human psychological perspective, which makes it both unique and complex for the individual or organization involved.

Researchers Seo and Barrett (2007) present a theory that, contrary to the popular belief that emotions are dysfunctional in decision making, individuals who are able to identify and distinguish among their feelings have a greater chance of making successful and sound decisions. They do so by looking critically at their own internal bias and finding a more productive outcome through a cooperative balance between pure logic and pure emotion.

While it is true that affective influence and reactivity are distinct individual characteristics, research shows that emotional differentiation has a critical implication for the use of a variety of past experiences in order to be far more predictive about potentially positive outcomes. This is likely due to emotionality of attention honing the specific way these individuals look at the world and gauge different decision outcomes. In addition, there are often dual and opposing viewpoints regarding affective emotional experience. One view holds that emotions are a source of noise — of unwanted bias — and play no part in regulating appropriate levels of decision making (Gross and John, 2003). This paradigm supports the notion that decisions should be based on empirical and quantitative knowledge, and as such should be held to a rigorous standard of not only logic but of sound and reasonable empiricism.

The alternative view is more holistic in nature and focuses on the idea that emotions play an important and adaptive role in decision making. They not only benefit the personal well-being and actualization of the individual making the decision, but they also improve the chances of overall success because the addition of feelings and emotions into the equation adds substantive, if qualitative, information — ensuring that the outcome is far more reasonable and relative to most situations (Gross and John, 2003).

The Organizational Suppression of Workplace Emotion

Ashforth and Humphrey (1995) acknowledge that the workplace environment is often riddled with emotion, yet argue that most research has neglected the way emotion plays an important role within the organizational process. According to the authors, this neglect has led to an often negative view of emotion within the decision-making environment, so much so that logic and facts are seen as far more important than any other stimuli. Institutions then have four ways of mitigating — which often means neutralizing — emotions within the workplace: (1) neutralizing, (2) buffering, (3) prescribing, and (4) normalizing.

Neutralizing prevents culturally or socially unacceptable emotions from becoming part of the professional environment. Buffering tempers emotional output and allows for socially acceptable communications. Prescribing normalizes these emotions within expected boundaries, and normalizing helps to regulate and intersperse emotions into modes of expression or communication.

In relation to the influence and reactivity of expressing emotion — and even encouraging a more emotional response, as in Seo and Barrett — Ashforth and Humphrey believe that emotionality and rationality are really two halves of the same coin: both necessary and inseparable for the healthy individual, and therefore for the healthy organizational environment. Without an adequate measure of emotionality, issues critical to the modern organization — including leadership, group dynamics, motivation, job satisfaction, and competitive interpretation — are found wanting. Emotions in the workplace are integral to how an organization communicates internally, establishes its own unique corporate culture, and conveys that culture to outside stakeholders.

References

Ashforth, B., & Humphrey, R. (1995). Emotion in the workplace: A reappraisal. Human Relations, 48(2), 97–125.

Baron, R., & Kenny, D. (1986). The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(6), 1173–82.

Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes' error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Penguin.

Gross, J., & John, O. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–62.

Seo, M., & Barrett, L. (2007). Being emotional during decision making — good or bad? An empirical investigation. Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 923–40.