"No passion eliminates the ability to act and reason as effectively as fear does" Edmund Burke.
When the work is managed and people are led under the paradigm of the traditional company (command-control), what is valued is the discipline, the attitude of obedience and the behavior of compliance. These types of labor ties are generally sustained by a collective state of mind of fear and mutual mistrust.
On the contrary, in order to mobilize knowledge and collective initiative, to take advantage of the talent, creativity and capacity for innovation that each individual can contribute, it is required that people are imbued with and committed to the vision and objectives of the company., motivated with the tasks to be carried out and that they assume a behavior of responsibility for the results. All of this is only possible in an organizational culture based on the emotionality of trust.
We will develop some of the most relevant aspects of these moods (fear and trust), focusing the analysis on the ways in which they manifest themselves in organizational settings and on how they impact on the behaviors of their members.
The fear
Pilar Jericó, a specialist who has devoted herself to studying the emotionality of fear in the business sphere, maintains: " No one will openly recognize it, but fear has been used as a management method in companies for centuries (and it continues to be used) ".
We generally associate the concept of fear with the emotional reaction to a dangerous situation. However, when we analyze it as organizational emotionality, we refer to fear as a state of mind that lasts over time. It acts as a background in people's behaviors, colors relationships, and persists as a distinctive component of organizational culture.
Fear can manifest itself in various ways and at different levels of intensity. It can range from fearful discomfort to panic. When we speak of “fear management”, we mean low intensity but long lasting fear.
It is very different if it is an emotion of fear that arises as a reaction to a specific event in a specific circumstance, than when a mood of fear is installed as a form of interaction and organizational coexistence. Both emotionalities differ in the ways in which they are expressed, in the consequences they generate in behavior and in the impact they can have on people's health and quality of life. The mood of fear in the workplace is one of the most frequent triggers of stress.
When fear occurs as a consequence of a certain event, such as the discussion with the boss or the problem with a client, once that moment has passed, the normal situation is reestablished and work in a calm and relaxed atmosphere. Faced with these types of events, our entire body alert system is activated. The emotion of fear is related to "positive stress" or eustress, which persists as long as the situation lasts and then disappears.
Quite different is the case in which the mood of fear persists and is part of the work climate that is breathed in the organization. To the extent that we feel our work environment as a place of permanent risk, we enter a state of continuous stress. When one goes from a momentary "alert reaction" to a constant "state of vigilance", the hormonal system, in addition to releasing adrenaline, begins to release corticosteroids that generate chronic stress or distress, which affects the immune system and leaves exposed to the body to contract various diseases.
This state of mind of fear and continuous stress destroys our motivation, undermines our capacity for action, consumes our energy and makes it impossible for us to unfold our potential. This not only has consequences at the level of low performance and individual effectiveness, but also impacts organizational productivity and business competitiveness. From people who work in a state of mind of fear and mistrust, obedience, compliance and discipline can be expected, but initiative, creativity, involvement with the task, or commitment to the organization can never be expected.
Management by fear is one of the factors that slows down the development of talent and the use of collective knowledge. Companies often confuse submission with loyalty and are unaware of the costs of authoritarian driving styles. Pfeffer and Sutton, two researchers at Stanford University who studied the problem of knowledge management, state that: “In each and every one of the organizations that failed to translate knowledge into action, we observed that an atmosphere of fear and fear prevailed. of mistrust ”.
One of the central characteristics of the emotionality of fear is that it has a temporal dimension that links the present to the future. As we pointed out earlier, all emotions are located in certain temporal coordinates. For example, emotional states of anger or resentment are related to something that happened. Like hatred, gratitude or gratitude link the present with the past. We are never angry because of something that is going to happen, but because of something that happened.
On the contrary, there are states of mind that are related to events that we think may happen and that arise from our expectations about future events. The fearful mood is one of them. It is an emotionality that emerges when we think that some event or circumstance - real or imagined - can cause us harm or even disturb our quality of life.
We are not afraid of something that happened but of what we think might happen. However, what we suppose to happen is likely based on past experiences. If we return to the distinction we make between the emotion of fear that arises as a reaction to a specific event and dissipates once it has been concluded, and, on the other hand, the mood of fear that is installed, persists over time and acts as a background of our actions, we could say that for this mood to be located at the organizational level, surely there must have been a few situations in the past that support the judgment that they can happen again.
When the emotionality of fear is installed, we enter a state of continuous alert against the supposed "danger". This "danger" can be constituted by the possibility of losing one's job, mistreatment by the boss, not getting a promotion, being transferred from an area or much more subtle situations. Companies that use these control methods deploy a set of mechanisms based on the well-known "carrot and stick" paradigm.
Regardless of how real or fictitious the perceived “danger” may be, what is relevant is that once fear is established as a permanent mood, it conditions our expectations about the future and our capacity for action in the present. Pfeffer and Sutton conclude by way of their research that: " The available evidence is quite convincing: Running a business based on fear and mistrust is not only inhumane, it is also bad business."
The trust
This same quality of linking the present with the future is possessed by the emotionality of trust. When we are in a confident frame of mind we feel that there is nothing to worry about. We act from a sense of security and have a positive expectation of the future. The mood of confidence arises from an interpretation of a future that seems predictable and reassuring to us.
When we say that we have confidence in a person, what we are saying is that we have a high level of assurance regarding their future behavior. We trust that you are very likely to do certain things and not do others. Trust always supposes a judgment about the future and that is why it so strongly determines our behavior.
We can imagine any situation, either at a personal or work level and we can corroborate the different behaviors that we adopt in an emotionality of trust or distrust. If we have confidence in a friend, in our partner, in a supplier or in a client, we will assume that they will act within what was agreed, that they will keep their word and that they will honor their commitments, and this gives us security and calm.
On the contrary, if in any of these cases we feel mistrust, if we fear that they will not act according to what has been pre-established, if we think that there is a possibility that they are not sincere in what they tell us or that they do not have the intention or the ability to comply with established agreements, our behavior would be markedly different. We would take precautions, we would not establish the commitment, we would distance ourselves from our friend or we would change providers. Mutual trust is the emotionality necessary to coordinate actions between people.
Although it may be that someone we have just met inspires confidence in us, generally this feeling arises as a result of a process of joint construction that takes place between people, since it implies a judgment about the behavior of the other and how this behavior can affect or influence our horizon of possibilities. But just as to gain confidence we need time and a joint experience in which we can observe and evaluate the behavior of the person, paradoxically the loss of confidence is something that happens very quickly. An action that defrauds the confidence conferred is generally a reason for us to change our attitude and our emotionality. There is a saying that accounts for this phenomenon and says that “confidence grows with the slowness of the palm tree and falls with the speed of the coconut ”.
The emotionality of trust is based on three pillars, which are built on the basis of the judgments we make about the credibility, predictability and responsibility of people.
The judgment of credibility is in turn based on two behaviors developed by individuals we consider credible: sincerity and suitability.
- Sincerity: we consider someone sincere when we assume that there is a correlation between what they think and what they say. When we perceive a congruence between your internal and external world. When we can verify that their conversations reflect their thoughts and convictions and that, therefore, they are someone who does not lie, does not hide information, or evade saying what they think Suitability: We attribute this characteristic to those who we consider to have the skills necessary to effectively perform the function they perform. Let's think about how much confidence we can have in someone whom we do not consider suitable to carry out the actions to which they are committed. This becomes a critical issue in relation to people who exercise a leadership role, since to grant them authority we start from the presumption that they adequately perform not only their specific tasks, but also their leadership function. Leadership can only be viable in an emotionality of mutual trust that sustains it.
Predictability is the characteristic that arises when someone over time shows a behavior that inexorably coincides with the established guidelines, with the declared values and with the commitments made. We say that a person is coherent and predictable when there is a correlation between what he says and what he does, when we consider that his actions are in tune with what he proclaims from the word and we evaluate that he will not surprise us with some kind of unforeseen behavior. Predictable people give us security and remove uncertainty from the future.
In many companies, employees show great mistrust as they perceive that the actions carried out by those who drive are not consistent with the assumptions they make. On the one hand there are the vision and the declared values and on the other there are the daily behaviors towards employees and customers. A paradigmatic case of this was the Enrom company, which became the sixth in turnover in the United States and in 2001 it was declared bankrupt due to the fraud committed by 29 of its executives. However, he declared that one of his main values was integrity.
Nathaniel Branden argues that: “ Consistency and predictability inspire confidence. If we feel that we do not know how a leader can act in a particular situation, we cannot feel confident. If a person is sometimes sincere and sometimes not, sometimes fair and sometimes not, sometimes respectful of their values and sometimes not, we may still be able to appreciate other virtues in them, such as intelligence, energy, enthusiasm or creativity, but we will not feel confident. And when we don't trust we rarely give our best ”.
Responsibility is the attribute we give to people who make their commitments and keep their promises. The effectiveness and productivity of any team or organization is determined by its competence to establish commitments and coordinate actions. When we assume that with whom we establish a commitment is a person who acts responsibly, we infer that they will carry out in a timely manner what they have committed to and that they will take care of any eventuality and contingency that may occur. Obviously, this behavior builds trust.
Jericó Pilar, “NoMiedo”, Alienta, Barcelona, 2006
Pfeffer Jeffrey and Sutton Robert, "The gap between knowing and doing", Granica, Bs. As., 2005
Branden Nathaniel, "Self-esteem at work", Paidós, Barcelona, 1998.
