Companies are finding that the attitudes and emotions in the workplace make a difference in individual behavior as well as in the organizations performance and customer service. In the past, companies didn’t think that organizational attitudes and emotions affected the performance of their company. So in today’s business world companies are investing a lot of money to keep their employees happy and stress free by giving them more vacation days and a better working environment.
Keeping employees loyal and motivated allows a company to gain a competitive advantage. When employees are working in a business environment that treats them with respect and equality the employees are going to work more efficiently.Our group chose the movie The Social Network because it is a good example of how the key concepts from our topic can be applied to real life situations. In this paper we will talk about specific scenes from the movie that relate to our topic of how emotions, attitudes and stress affect individuals in the workplace.A number of academic journals will be reviewed and related back to both our topic and the movie.
The movie The Social Network has to deal with emotions attitudes and stress within the work environment and how it affects both organizational commitment and company loyalty. This paper will talk about how our topic is relevant to individuals, organizations and life in general. Also we will discuss what aspects of the movie led us to choose this topic.Research TopicThe topic we have focused our report on is: The Effects of Emotions, Attitudes and Stress on the Workplace.Research Topic Relevance We chose the topic emotions, stress and attitudes in the workplace because the movie The Social Network is built off of our very topic.
From the first scene screen writer Aaron Sorkin portrayed emotions as he opened the movie with a negative conversation between main character Mark Zuckerberg and his soon to be ex-girlfriend. This initial scene sparks a flame within Mark, which is followed throughout the rest of the movie.That night Mark needed to get his mind off of her and decides to make a quick and nasty website that would compare two University girls to each other. The results of this website introduced Mark to two individuals, the Winklevoss twins who approached Mark with the idea of a social networking website called the Harvard Connection and wanted Mark to code it for them.
This meeting gave birth to the idea of Facebook, but more importantly set Mark and his best friend Eduardo on a collision course with negative emotions and attitudes towards each other. The second half of this movie is filled with twists and turns all created because of anger, stress and attitude between characters, and within their workplace. The character Sean Parker is the root of these problems. He starts to separate Mark and Eduardo from each other and negative emotions starts are continually created, resulting in poor decisions being made and ultimately the end of a partnership and friendship.What aspects of the movie led you to choose this topic? We chose “The Social Network” because it deals with a lot of group dynamics. These dynamics, such as social cohesion and emotional response, play an important role in how the movie affects its audience.
The court room scenes, in which Mark is defending himself against the barrage of questions from judges hired by his friends to sue him, are very emotional and dig right into the heart of not only the viewers, but the actors as well. The betrayal, mistrust and constant bantering between the persons involved has a large effect on the emotional turmoil of an individual.How is the topic relevant to individuals and organizations in general? This topic relates directly to many individuals and organizations that are struggling with a balance of power and trust. Thoughout the creation of facebook, there was a lot of mistrust. When Mark was offered a position by the twin brothers, his lack of response gained their mistrust. When Eduardo came back from New York to discover Facebook had taken a different twist, he felt neglected.
All these emotions are typical in a daily work atmosphere. Everyone wants to feel included and important. Employees want a sense of belonging and an emotional connection with their co-workers. The Social Network shows its audience how people in an organized association act when the boundaries of trust and comfort are tested.Literary AnalysisBelow are 5 articles that support the topic of our report: The Effects of Emotions, Attitudes and Stress on the Workplace.
The findings of the article are highlighted below.Article #1: Evidence that Emotional Intelligence is Related to job performance and affect and attitudes at work. Written by Paul N. Lopes, Daisy Grewa, Jessica Kadis, Michelle Gall and Peter Salovey. This article, written by five authors from the University of Oviedo in Spain, was produced as a testing on the general hypothesis that “emotional intelligence is related to company indicators of job performance, as well as rating of interpersonal facilitation and affect and attitudes at work.” (p.
133). They started out by conducting a test on 44 workers, all of which worked for “Fortune 400 Insurance”.They composed of clerical/administrative employees and business analysts. One topic they touched on while creating their hypothesis was the concept that “The ability to perceive emotions in oneself and others entails identifying internal cues of emotional experience and emotional information…” (P.
132). this hypothesis carries hand in hand, the concept our study is striving to prove. The article further supports emotional perception by stating that emotional intelligence can be directly related to such things as: “Company rank, percent merit increase and ratings of interpersonal facilitation..
.” (p. 137).Article #2: Work Stress and Job Performance. Written by Statistics Canada. Statistics Canada released this article in 2007, detailing some key pin points in job stress, how it is created, and how it affects ones workplace performance.
They describe four levels of Psychological Demands: low strain, active, passive and high strain. Factors such as: which psychological demand a company is producing, physical/mental exertion, and socio-economic status were some key issues that directly related to our movie at hand: The Social Network. This study on work stress was able to pin point almost every job opportunity into the four main sections above. This can be directly compared to the text’s main perceptions of emotions within a work place environment which were divided into four main categories: self-awareness, social awareness, self-management and relationship management. This article has taken the concept of “self” and heightened it to levels that include the corporation as a whole, and how that affects employee performance.Article #3: Emotions in the Workplace: The Neglect of Organization Behaviour.
Written by Paul M. MuchinskyThe overall purpose of this article is to address emotion in the workplace, which is an important role in organization behaviour. It covers the possible reasons why emotion is neglected. It then lists reasons why it should be considered due to the fact that the workplace is "a rich arena for the manifestation of human emotion, both positive and negative.”This journal starts off by trying to understand why people are reluctant to address emotions in the workplace.
P. Muchinsky believes that one explanation is that emotions are seen as a form of weakness and instability, which are unwanted in organizations. These emotions can come in many forms, for example the first is what they call "nasty" emotions they include anger, jealousy, and envy. The seconds is called existential emotions including anxiety, guilt and shame.This journal is relevant because our group wants to understand how an organization can be affected by certain emotions, stress and attitudes in a workplace. This journal illustrates that emotions in the workplace can, and will affect people and should be monitored closely by organizational behaviour.
Article #4: Organizational Responses to Deviant Anger Displays at Work. Written by: Deanna Geddes and Lisa T. Stickney. Using results found from an open-ended survey, conducted by the author, this article looks at employer reactions when put in a situation where an employee is expressing deviant anger. Three categories of deviant anger are noted including, physical acts, intense verbal displays, and inappropriate communication. Comparatively, the study also looks at employee reactions to both formal and informal sanctioning by employers.
The article continues to explain that, employees and employers view anger actions as either appropriate or not. Often times anger is viewed as appropriate if the individual has been provoked or when an anger action incorporates limited markers of intensity. Unacceptable anger actions include shouting, writing expletive messages and violenceFor the purposes of this paper, we will focus on 2 of the hypotheses mentioned in the article by Geddes and Stickney (2011), including: Hypothesis1a: Deviant anger in the form of physical acts or intense verbal displays, in contrast to other forms of inappropriate communication, increases formal sanctioning by management. Hypothesis 1b: Deviant anger in the form of physical acts or intense verbal displays, in contrast to other forms of inappropriate communication, increases informal sanctioning by coworkers.
(pg. 206)The study finds that contrary to what one may believe, when an individual is formally sanctioned this can lead to a diversion of attention and resources to the employee. Therefore, the following hypotheses by Geddes and Stickney (2011) is generated: Hypothesis 2a: Formal sanctions imposed by management in response to deviant anger decrease effective situational change at work. Hypothesis 2b: Informal sanctions imposed by coworkers in response to deviant anger. Hypothesis 2b: Informal sanctions imposed by coworkers in response to deviant anger.
(pg. 207)If an employer responds supportively to a deviant angry employee, the study shows that, subsequently, a favorable change will occur, improving the problematic situation and improving the work environment.There are certainly parallels between this article and Emotions in the workplace: the neglect of organization behaviour written by Paul M. Muchinsky. The article by Muchinsky talks about emotions being seen as a form of weakness and instability, which are unwanted in organizations.
The first form of emotion the article talks about is “nasty” emotions that include anger, jealousy, and envy. While it is true these emotions are often unwanted in the workplace, the article by Geddes and Stickney highlights ways to deal with these emotions – through supportive sanctioning.With relevance to the main theme of this paper, it is interesting to note that when examining this study, it is clear that workplace emotions and attitudes have a substantial effect on performance. Contrary to what one might think, the study indicates that supportive reactions to negative emotions may actually improve problematic situations, thereby improving productivity in the workplace.Article #5: Emotions in the Workplace: The Neglect of Organization Behaviour. Written by Paul M.
Muchinsky This article has to deal with building organizational commitment through many different characteristic traits such as transparency, behavioral integrity and trust. For the purpose of our project and the movie we have selected, we are going to mainly focus on trust in the article. The article demonstrates that trust is positively related to team performance and is an important antecedent for a number of key outcomes, including job performance, organizational citizenship behaviors, organizational commitment and job satisfaction (Palanski, 2011). This article is in direct correlation with our topic of choice, which is workplace emotions, attitudes, and stress.According to the article the main reason for the creation of an organization or business is to create teams.
A team exists to accomplish specific tasks that range from complex to simple forms of problem solving. A “team” or organization can only accomplish task when there is a certain level of trust with in the team. Employees identify with and feel obliged to work for an organization only when they trust their leaders (McShane, 2009). When trust is absent, then the goals and the specific tasks that the organization set out for will fail to develop. This is because the team doesn’t have trust in each other or they stop working towards the common goal of the organization.The employees that make up the team either don’t understand the goals of the organization or the goals of the organization aren’t a representation of the beliefs of its employees.
This discrepancy between the goals of the employees and its organization diminishes trust between the two and greatly affects job performance. When a team works together and has a definite leader and goal, any task can be accomplished.
