Tag Archives: Employee Motivation

The Different Types of Emotions and how They Impact Human Behavior

As we have already seen in our previous articles, human behavior affects organizational growth. In this article, we are going to talk about what I’ve learned about how emotions affect human behavior. There are different types of emotions that can influence the way we live and talk to others. Sometimes, it may seem like these emotions rule us. The actions we take, the choices we make and the perceptions we have been influenced by greatly impact our emotions at any given moment.

Psychologists and scholars from other fields have identified the different types of emotions we experience as humans. Different theories have come up to categorize and explain different types of emotions that people have.

Basic Emotions

There are six basic emotions that are universally experienced in all people irrespective of their cultures. These emotions are sadness, happiness, disgust, surprise, fear and anger. If we try to go further and expand these emotions, we will come up with other emotions such as shame, pride, excitement and embarrassment.

Combining Different Emotions

Emotions can be joined together to form different feelings. Just like the way we can mix different colors to form different shades. The basic emotions discussed above act like building blocks. Mixed emotions build complex emotions. For example, basic emotions such as trust and joy can be combined to create a greater emotion such as love. Now we will take a closer look at some of the basic emotions and try to figure out how they affect human behavior in an organization.

Happiness

Most people strive to have the happiness of all the types of emotions discussed above. Happiness is a pleasant emotional state, and it is characterized by the feeling of joy, contentment, satisfaction, gratification, and well-being. Scholars have done numerous researches on happiness since the 1960s within different disciplines such as positive psychology. Happiness is sometimes expressed through body language, facial expressions such as smiling, and a pleasant tone.

Happiness is one of the basic emotions, but things that create happiness are majorly influenced by culture. For example, the hip-hop culture emphasizes that buying things such as flashy cars makes one happy. This makes it hard to understand the things that contribute to happiness because different people are influenced by different things. Some people believe that health and happiness are connected. According to research, happiness plays a major role in mental and physical health. We can link happiness to a variety of outcomes such as increased marital satisfaction, increased salaries and a welcoming working environment when it comes to organizations.

Conversely, we can link unhappiness to a variety of things such as anxiety, stress, loneliness, depression and more.

Sadness

Sadness is a transient emotional state. It is typically characterized by feelings of grief, disappointment, disinterest, hopelessness, and a dampened mood. Sadness is an emotion that all people experience. In some cases, people experience severe and prolonged periods of sadness that can become depression.

There are several ways we can express sadness such as quietness, dampened mood, withdrawal from others, lethargy and crying. The severity and type of sadness can vary depending on the cause and people cope with sadness in different ways. Sadness can make people avoid other people or even have negative thoughts about life.

Fear

This is a very powerful emotion, and it can play an important role in survival. People go through flight or fight response when they face some sort of fear. Your heart rate increases, your muscles become tense, and your mind becomes more alert. This primes your body either to stand and fight or to run from danger. The response ensures that you are prepared to deal with the threats in your environment which can be an organizational setting. Expressions of fear include attempts to flee or hide from threats, facial expressions such as pulling back the chin or widening the eyes and physiological reactions such as increased heart rate.

People experience fear in different ways. Some people may be more sensitive to certain objects that may trigger fear. Fear can be defined as an emotional response to a sudden threat.

Disgust

This is a basic emotion that can be displayed in numerous ways such as turning away from things of disgust, facial expressions such as curling the upper lip and wrinkling the nose and physical reactions such as retching or vomiting.

Different things can cause disgust such as unpleasant smell, sight or taste. Experts believe that disgust evolved as a reaction to harmful foods. When people taste or smell foods that have been contaminated, they experience disgust. Infection, poor hygiene, rot, blood, and death can cause disgust. There is also moral disgust when people observe other people engaging in behaviors that they find immoral, distasteful or evil. Relationships between bosses and employees in organizations can be disgusting to other employees.

Anger

This is a very powerful emotion, and it is characterized by feelings of agitation, hostility, antagonism, and frustration towards others. Anger is similar to fear in that it can trigger a flight or fight response in the body. A threat can generate a feeling of anger and make you fend off the danger or fight to protect yourself.

Anger can be displayed through body language such as turning away from someone, facial expressions such as glaring or frowning, tone of voice such as yelling or speaking gruffly, a physiological response such as turning red or sweating, and aggression such as kicking, hitting or throwing objects. Anger can negatively affect the productivity of employees in an organization.

Surprise

This is another one of the basic types of human emotions. It is typically brief, and we can characterize surprise by a physiological startle response due to unexpected things. Surprise can be negative, positive or neutral. The unpleasant surprise might involve someone scaring you as you walk. An example of a pleasant surprise is when you arrive home and find your friends gathered to celebrate your birthday. We can characterize surprise by facial expressions such as widening the eyes raising the brows and opening the mouth. We can also characterize surprise through physical responses such as jumping up or back and verbal reactions such as gasping, screaming and yelling. Positive surprises to employees in an organization can increase their productivity.  

How Positive Feedback Influences The Bottom Line

Positive feedback matters. It makes a difference in employee morale and motivation. As someone in the support and operations area of business, I cannot emphasize this enough.

Let’s be honest, it’s easy to complain online if and when services that you expect do not get provided correctly or on time. To be completely frank, with tools like Twitter and Facebook at our beck and call, this has become even simpler than it ever was before. Not only can you complain about a company, but you can shout it from the rooftops and you’ll have hundreds if not thousands of people joining in the conversation.

The Power of Positive Feedback

Don’t ever underestimate the power of positive feedback. We are quick to point out to someone when they make a mistake. Sometimes we forget to acknowledge them when they do something right. As a leader, I have to often deal with the negative complaints about the service my team provides. While part of solving that problem is an additional process through things like post-mortems and RCAs, the flip side is acknowledging that there are some rare customers out there that take the time to recognize good work also!

Don’t ever underestimate the power of positive feedback. We are quick to point out to someone when they make a mistake. Sometimes we forget to acknowledge them when they do something right. As a leader, I have to often deal with the negative complaints about the service my team provides. While part of solving that problem is an additional process through things like post-mortems and RCAs, the flip side is acknowledging that there are some rare customers out there that take the time to recognize good work also!

To those rare customers – THANK YOU!! Giving positive feedback can be a powerful tool for employee motivation and your time is sincerely appreciated. For the managers and leaders lucky enough to have received such feedback, here’s how to use it most effectively:

  • Do it now. Positive feedback is too important to let slide. Say something right away.
  • Make it public. While negative feedback should be given privately, positive feedback should be given publicly. Do it in front of as large a group as appropriate.
  • Be specific. Don’t just say “Good job, Sally.” Instead say something like “Hakim, that new procedure you developed for routing service calls has really improved our customer satisfaction. Thanks for coming up with it.”
  • Make a big deal out of it. You don’t want to assemble the entire company every time you give positive feedback, but do as much ceremony as the action warrants.
  • Consider the receiver. It is important to consider the feeling of the person receiving recognition. For a very shy person, thanking him in front of his workgroup is probably most appropriate. For another person, you might hang a banner, balloons, and streamers in the department area.
  • Do it often. Don’t wait for the big successes. Celebrate the small ones too.
  • Do it evenly. Big successes need big recognition; small successes need smaller recognition. If you throw a party for every small success, you diminish its effect for a big success.
  • Be sincere. Don’t praise someone for coming in on time. Don’t congratulate someone for just doing their job. People will see right through you. Really mean it when you give positive feedback.

The Importance of Surveys

If you’re not getting positive feedback, are you sure that you’re asking for it? This is where surveying your customers comes in really handy. Many companies wrongly make the assumption that the Customer Service Team is completely disparate to the rest of the company and has no bearing on new business or in serving their existing customers aside from when they have a problem or an issue. In reality they are the face of your business and often know about new problems in the field before anyone else.

Customer Surveys allow you to collect valuable data from your customer base while simultaneously reinforcing perceptions that your organization genuinely cares about their opinions and welcomes their feedback.  If your organization does not have a process in place to gather this invaluable information, it should do so quickly with the help of a customer survey.  By listening to the voice of your clientele, you are ideally situating your organization to develop or maintain a competitive advantage.

Why Customer Experience Matters

Historically having siloed departments perhaps made sense in some industries. While this might have been historically true (and even then, not so much) customer experience has taken on a renewed focus in the industry. Many companies actually acknowledge that it is a key differentiator for them so anything that a business can do to improve this should be emphasized.

The impact of employee experience on customer experience has been explored in great detail. In fact, “happy employees equal happy customers” has become a motto for some of the world’s biggest brands.  While this might be an old argument, it has validity and is a mantra worth remembering.

The same companies invest in employee happiness year after year. The rest continue to not invest. There’s a clear line between companies that get it and companies that don’t and there’s not a lot of .