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Organizational Aesthetics and the Promise of Happiness. How Aesthetic Experiences of Employees Contribute to Happiness
Abstract
Since Guillén (1997) wrote his pioneering article 'Scientific Management's Lost Aesthetic' and concluded that 'we have long neglected the aesthetic context of organizational behavior', there is a little but growing amount of articles about aesthetics in organizations. By the change of type of work to more knowledge-intensive and individual labor, experiencing beauty could be a feature of 'modern organizations'. Although at the end of the last century the field of organizational aesthetics offered some first ideas, these ideas are hardly originated from empirical research, or even related to the phenomenon of hapiness. This study examines which stimuli in organizational events trigger positive and negative aesthetic experiences (PAEs and NAEs) of professionals, in particular of 5 surgeons and 5 teachers, and which emotion they affect. They registered 244 PAEs and 189 NAEs in a self-report (BEL book: Beauty Experience Log book) and individually valued these in a Stendhal Grid. In this Stendhal Grid the degree of beauty versus a degree of emotional impact of all PAEs and NAEs were scored. The main conclusion of this study is that OAS in professional organizations trigger aesthetic experiences which contribute to happiness.). Reflecting on the collected data on aesthetic experiences of professionals (PAEs and NAEs), in particular emotions like alert, excited, elated (caused by PAEs) are remarkable. They in particular represent emotions in the spectrum of happiness because of experienced beauty with high emotional impact and ugliness with high emotional impact. Besides the contribution to happiness of employees, recent studies on organizational aesthetics show that aesthetic experiences of employees strongly correlate with their affective commitment, represented by the outcomes pride, work pleasure, and flow experiences. Many other studies demonstrate that affective commitment can be considered as a predictor of performance. Nevertheless, this study offers quite new insights in aesthetic experiences of employees in professional organizations and their contribution to happiness.
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This article introduces a single-item scale, the Affect Grid, designed as a quick means of assessing affect along the dimensions of pleasure–displeasure and arousal–sleepiness. The Affect Grid is potentially suitable for any study that requires judgments about affect of either a descriptive or a subjective kind. The scale was shown to have adequate reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity in 4 studies in which college students used the Affect Grid to describe (a) their current mood, (b) the meaning of emotion-related words, and (c) the feelings conveyed by facial expressions. Other studies (e.g., J. Snodgrass et al; see record
1989-13842-001) are cited to illustrate the potential uses of the Affect Grid as a measure of mood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The greater power of bad events over good ones is found in everyday events, major life events (e.g., trauma), close relationship outcomes, social network patterns, interpersonal interactions, and learning processes. Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones, and bad information is processed more thoroughly than good. The self is more motivated to avoid bad self-definitions than to pursue good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones. Various explanations such as diagnosticity and salience help explain some findings, but the greater power of bad events is still found when such variables are controlled. Hardly any exceptions (indicating greater power of good) can be found. Taken together, these findings suggest that bad is stronger than good, as a general principle across a broad range of psychological phenomena.
Extract:Affective Events Theory (AET) (Weiss and Cropanzano, 1996) proposes that organizational events are proximal causes of affective reactions. "Things happen to people in work settings and people often react emotionally to these events. These affective experiences have direct influences on behaviors and attitudes". Recent research by Fisher (1998) has supported the hypothesized relationship between aggregated moment to moment emotions at work and outcomes such as job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and intention to quit. AET also proposes that stable work environment features such as job scope predispose the occurrence of certain types of affect-producing events. For instance, an enriched job might more often lead to discrete events involving feedback, task accomplishment, and optimal challenge, which may then lead to positive emotions such as pride, happiness, and enthusiasm.
The authors tested a model, inspired by affective events theory (H. M. Weiss & R. Cropanzano, 1996), that examines the dynamic nature of emotions at work, work attitudes, and workplace deviance. Sixty-four employees completed daily surveys over 3 weeks, reporting their mood, job satisfaction, perceived interpersonal treatment, and deviance. Supervisors and significant others also evaluated employees' workplace deviance and trait hostility, respectively. Over half of the total variance in workplace deviance was within-individual, and this intraindividual variance was predicted by momentary hostility, interpersonal justice, and job satisfaction. Moreover, trait hostility moderated the interpersonal justice-state hostility relation such that perceived injustice was more strongly related to state hostility for individuals high in trait hostility.
Drawing on archival and textual materials, this paper challenges conventional views of scientific management by exploring its aesthetic implications through an analysis of the inspiration that the European modernist architects of the 1890-1930 period drew from the ideology and techniques associated with this organizational model. The historical and institutional conditions that surrounded such a revolutionary reinterpretation of scientific management are compared across countries. The common grounding of scientific management and modernist architecture in engineering is proposed as the key influence that shaped the professional reconstruction of the organizational field of architecture and the subsequent diffusion of modernist design. The implications for organizational studies are discussed in the context of the prevailing underestimation of scientific management's qualities and impact on society.
This paper documents emotion as integral to stakeholders' sense making of a key organizational artifact, demonstrating that emotion toward artifacts blends into emotion toward the organization. Multiple stakeholders were interviewed about an artifact of a large public transportation organization. Sense making of the artifact is shown to involve emotion in interpretations that consider three dimensions of the artifact--instrumentality, aesthetics, and symbolism. Instrumentality relates to the tasks the artifact helps accomplish, aesthetics is the sensory reaction to the artifact, and symbolism regards associations the artifact elicits. The analysis demonstrates that sense making of these three dimensions includes unsolicited emotion both toward the artifact and toward the organization. Emotion that surfaces in sense making of organizational artifacts is, thus, suggested to be what links interpretation of artifacts and attitudes toward organizations. This paper lays foundations for a theory of organizational artifacts that can guide both thoughtful research and effective management of artifacts in organizations.
In recent studies of the structure of affect, positive and negative affect have consistently emerged as two dominant and relatively independent dimensions. A number of mood scales have been created to measure these factors; however, many existing measures are inadequate, showing low reliability or poor convergent or discriminant validity. To fill the need for reliable and valid Positive Affect and Negative Affect scales that are also brief and easy to administer, we developed two 10-item mood scales that comprise the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). The scales are shown to be highly internally consistent, largely uncorrelated, and stable at appropriate levels over a 2-month time period. Normative data and factorial and external evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the scales are also presented. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)
The purpose of this paper is to identify suitable methods for measuring future-oriented emotions in a consumer context, where they have been shown to play an important role in decision-making. However the experience and knowledge of future-oriented emotions in consumer research is limited and it is thus necessary to broaden the perspective to cover emotions in general to gain insight into the possible methods. This paper examines the methods for measuring emotions in a consumer context. Emotions have recently gained increasing attention but the measurement of emotions is complex and the experience is limited. However several methods have been applied over time and a review of these methods and the experiences gained can build a foundation for further research in the area of future- oriented emotions in consumer decision-making. Three overall approaches to the measurement of emotions in consumer research are found: Self report, autonomic measures and brain imaging. Verbal Self Report and fMRI are assessed to be the most important methods. Self report is the most commonly used technique to measure emotions especially in consumer research and this is primarily verbal self report. However the method is found to have severe limitations. Brain imaging and especially fMRI has contributed significantly to the progress in cognitive neuroscience and the technique has also entered consumer research in form of neuroeconomics or consumer neuroscience often focusing on emotional aspects and decision making. fMRI is found to offer intriguing new possibilities for insight. However the method is extremely expensive and requires special equipment and expert knowledge that are not usually found in consumer research. Although problematic and challenging it is found that further work on the measurement of emotions in general and future-oriented emotions in specific are important to consumer research.
Diversity in the conceptualization and measurement of organizational commitment has made it difficult to interpret the results of an accumulating body of research. In this article, we go beyond the existing distinction between attitudinal and behavioral commitment and argue that commitment, as a psychological state, has at least three separable components reflecting (a) a desire (affective commitment), (b) a need (continuance commitment), and (c) an obligation (normative commitment) to maintain employment in an organization. Each component is considered to develop as a function of different antecedents and to have different implications for on-the-job behavior. The aim of this reconceptualization is to aid in the synthesis of existing research and to serve as a framework for future research.
Three studies examined the interrelationships among work experiences, perceived organizational support (POS), affective commitment (AC), and employee turnover. Using a diverse sample of 367 employees drawn from a variety of organizations, Study 1 found that POS mediated positive associations of organizational rewards, procedural justice, and supervisor support with AC. Study 2 examined changes of POS and AC in retail employees over a 2-year span (N = 333) and a 3-year span (N = 226). POS was positively related to temporal changes in AC, suggesting that POS leads to AC. Study 3 found a negative relationship between POS and subsequent voluntary employee turnover that was mediated by AC in retail employees (N = 1,124) and in poultry- and feed-processing workers (N = 262). These results suggest that favorable work conditions operate via POS to increase AC, which, in turn, decreases employee withdrawal behavior.
Although aesthetic experiences are frequent in modern life, there is as of yet no scientifically comprehensive theory that explains what psychologically constitutes such experiences. These experiences are particularly interesting because of their hedonic properties and the possibility to provide self-rewarding cognitive operations. We shall explain why modern art's large number of individualized styles, innovativeness and conceptuality offer positive aesthetic experiences. Moreover, the challenge of art is mainly driven by a need for understanding. Cognitive challenges of both abstract art and other conceptual, complex and multidimensional stimuli require an extension of previous approaches to empirical aesthetics. We present an information-processing stage model of aesthetic processing. According to the model, aesthetic experiences involve five stages: perception, explicit classification, implicit classification, cognitive mastering and evaluation. The model differentiates between aesthetic emotion and aesthetic judgments as two types of output.