Our Workplace is Our Next Living Room By Jakaria Dasan
Our workplace is our next living room. It is a place where we spend most of our time in our daily life except Saturday, Sunday, and private holidays. As what we use to do at home, we always ensure that the set up of our living room is in a pleasant mood. The mood is not only for us to feel it, but also for the comfort of our guests. Tidying up is for sure, but creating a welcoming atmosphere has to be ensured. The other element concerns emotion. Most of the time our home is not merely our home sweet home. It is also a place where we practice and share the six emotions of anger, fear, sadness, happiness, disgust, and surprise as human being. Both emotions and moods are simultaneously potray what kind of affect that we have at home. In other words, the feeling that we and our guests have about our home comes from the existing emotions and moods.
Similar to what we like to have or feel at home, we also want our workplace to be at par. The management or employer, then, has to create a good quality of work life (qwl). Lawler 1975; Davis & Cherns, 1975; Sirgy, Efraty, Siegel and Lee, 2001) defined qwl as the well being of employees. It means that qwl are those aspects of work that the organization’s members see as desirable and as enhancing the qwl. In order to extend the qwl to become the comfort zone, employer needs to ensure that the right emotions and good mood are nurtured well. Of course the employer cannot satisfy the employees’ emotions, but by taking into account the emotional dissonance that the employees have to experience everyday, employer willingness to pump in additional investments should be a right move for greater performance. The employer should refer to the affective event theory which clearly explain the impact of emotional reactions on job satisfaction and job performance. This theory which is developed by Howard M. Weiss and Russell Cropanzano (1996), demonstrates that employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work and that this reaction influences their job performance and satisfaction
The affective events theory begins by recognizing that emotions are a response to an event in the work environment. The work environment includes everything surrounding the job—the variety of tasks and degree of autonomy, job demands, and requirements for expressing emotional labor. This environment creates work events that can be hassles, uplifts, or both. Examples of hassles are colleagues who refuse to carry their share of work, conflicting directions by different managers, and excessive time pressures. Examples of uplifting events include meeting a goal, getting support from a colleague, and receiving recognition for an accomplishment.
These work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions. But employees’ personalities and moods predisposes them to respond with greater or lesser intensity to the event. For instance, people who score low on emotional stability are more likely to react strongly to negative events. And their mood introduces the reality that their general affect cycle creates fluctuations. So a person’s emotional response to a given event can change depending on mood. Finally, emotions influence a number of performance and satisfaction variables such as organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, level of effort, intentions to quit, and workplace deviance.
As our next living room, it is very importance for the management, as the owner of the office, to ensure that the qwl is always mesmerized with good emotions and right moods. An increased in qwl will cause low level of stress or no stress at all. Employees need to be in an happy emotion along with the good mood to exert best performance. Remember that our workplace is our next living room!
by Jakaria Dasan
School of Business and Economics
Universiti Malaysia Sabah
Similar to what we like to have or feel at home, we also want our workplace to be at par. The management or employer, then, has to create a good quality of work life (qwl). Lawler 1975; Davis & Cherns, 1975; Sirgy, Efraty, Siegel and Lee, 2001) defined qwl as the well being of employees. It means that qwl are those aspects of work that the organization’s members see as desirable and as enhancing the qwl. In order to extend the qwl to become the comfort zone, employer needs to ensure that the right emotions and good mood are nurtured well. Of course the employer cannot satisfy the employees’ emotions, but by taking into account the emotional dissonance that the employees have to experience everyday, employer willingness to pump in additional investments should be a right move for greater performance. The employer should refer to the affective event theory which clearly explain the impact of emotional reactions on job satisfaction and job performance. This theory which is developed by Howard M. Weiss and Russell Cropanzano (1996), demonstrates that employees react emotionally to things that happen to them at work and that this reaction influences their job performance and satisfaction
The affective events theory begins by recognizing that emotions are a response to an event in the work environment. The work environment includes everything surrounding the job—the variety of tasks and degree of autonomy, job demands, and requirements for expressing emotional labor. This environment creates work events that can be hassles, uplifts, or both. Examples of hassles are colleagues who refuse to carry their share of work, conflicting directions by different managers, and excessive time pressures. Examples of uplifting events include meeting a goal, getting support from a colleague, and receiving recognition for an accomplishment.
These work events trigger positive or negative emotional reactions. But employees’ personalities and moods predisposes them to respond with greater or lesser intensity to the event. For instance, people who score low on emotional stability are more likely to react strongly to negative events. And their mood introduces the reality that their general affect cycle creates fluctuations. So a person’s emotional response to a given event can change depending on mood. Finally, emotions influence a number of performance and satisfaction variables such as organizational citizenship behavior, organizational commitment, level of effort, intentions to quit, and workplace deviance.
As our next living room, it is very importance for the management, as the owner of the office, to ensure that the qwl is always mesmerized with good emotions and right moods. An increased in qwl will cause low level of stress or no stress at all. Employees need to be in an happy emotion along with the good mood to exert best performance. Remember that our workplace is our next living room!
by Jakaria Dasan
School of Business and Economics
Universiti Malaysia Sabah
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