If you are able to read collective emotions, you can react accordingly when things are not going well. When many middle managers are afraid of losing their status and resources, as it was in the Nokia not a long time ago, you need to understand the group feelings. Otherwise you cannot tell whether or not only selective information is being reported and whether or not the top management knows what the actual situation is. Collective emotions, when you understand them, give you a guide about how to adapt accordingly and earn more respect from all your stakeholders, claims the knowledge.insead.edu website.
There are many tools for managers that help them to measure almost all emotional cues of individuals. There is even a test which enables workers to understand cross-cultural facial expressions. But handling interpersonal situations is only one part of the realm of emotions needed for business success.
Reading emotions of large groups
There is never enough time to operate on one-on-one basis all the time. Often you need to respond appropriately to the feelings of a group of workers as a whole. This may be the case when workers are feeling unsure, scared when they hear news of organizational restructuring. Politicians and public authorities, for example, need to deal with the collective anger and rage of thousands of people in the streets or they need to inspire large groups of people to win their trust and vote.
Collective emotions matters during times of transformation
According to the Assessing Collective Affect Recognition via the Emotional Aperture Measure study, carried out by researchers of INSEAD business school, typically people are able to focus either on the emotions of an individual, or of the whole group.The ability to estimate closely the proportion of people in a group who displayed positive or negative emotions significantly correlated with their ability to lead during transformation. The latter was assessed by the study participants’ direct reports. Such managers are able to more readily respond to frustrations and fears experienced by people in their organization.
If you want to check your ability to read emotions of groups, try the test available of the website of one of the mentioned study authors here. You will obtain your personal results free of charge.
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obtain their personal results free of charge