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Can Brains Manage? The Brain, Emotion, and Cognition in Organizations
Abstract
In response to recent calls to better understand the brain’s role in organizational behavior, we propose a series of theoretical tests to examine the question “can brains manage?” Our tests ask whether brains can manage without bodies and without extracranial resources, whether they can manage in social isolation, and whether brains are the ultimate controllers of emotional and cognitive aspects of organizational behavior. Our analysis shows that, to accomplish work-related tasks in organizations, the brain relies on and closely interfaces with the body, interpersonal and social dynamics, and cognitive and emotional processes that are distributed across persons and artifacts. The results of this “thought experiment” suggest that the brain is more appropriately conceived as a regulatory organ that integrates top-down (i.e., social, artifactual and environmental) and bottom-up (i.e., neural) influences on organizational behavior, rather than the sole cause of that behavior. Drawing on a socially situated perspective, our analysis develops a framework that connects brain, body and mind to social, cultural, and environmental forces, as significant components of complex emotional and cognitive organizational systems. We discuss the implications for the emerging field of organizational cognitive neuroscience and for conceptualizing the interaction between the brain, cognition and emotion in organizations.
... Microfoundations is a broad methodological stipulation encouraging scholars to eschew making macro-to-macro causal claims, but instead show how macro relations are mediated by micro (and meso) behaviours and mechanisms (Felin and Foss, 2005). The study of top managers' heuristics and biases has the potential to yield important bridging mechanisms between micro and macro perspectives on organizational behaviour and performance, not only by identifying bottom-up (micro-meso-macro) chains of emergence and causality (i.e., hierarchically reductive accounts), but also through the identification of top-down causal emergent mechanisms (see, e.g., Felin et al., 2015;Foss and Weber, 2016;Healey et al., 2018;Hodgkinson, 2014, 2015). ...
... Additional studies are required to tease out how such processes unfold beyond the confines of the top management team, and in so doing, shape the conduct and performance of lower-level teams, departmental units, and individuals. Future research might also profitably further explore how such team-level processes are influenced by broader cultural and institutional factors, in line with the microfoundations thinking that transcends traditional levels of analysis (Barney and Felin, 2013;Felin et al., 2012Felin et al., , 2015Felin and Foss, 2005;Foss, 2011;Gavetti, 2005;Healey et al., 2018;Hodgkinson, 2014, 2015;Helfat and Peteraf, 2015;Teece, 2007). In addition, the role of social heuristics, such as imitation, wisdom-ofcrowds, and word-of-mouth, could be explored further in this connection (Gigerenzer et al., 2022). ...
Psychology-grounded research on heuristics and biases in decision making has become increasingly influential in the field of management studies. However, although this line of inquiry is recognized as a valuable perspective for advancing understanding of decision processes in the upper echelons of firms, extant research remains unbalanced, the bulk of previous endeavours having been focused on managerial overconfidence, with insights from more recent dual-process theory and ecological rationality conceptions of heuristics less explored. This introductory article to the special issue of the Journal of Management Studies, entitled ‘the heuristics and biases of top managers: Past, present, and future’, offers a reflective review of prior work addressing its focal theme and places the articles incorporated into the special issue within this broader context. In addition, it sets out a number of directions for future work, with a view to inspiring the continuing advancement of conceptual and empirical knowledge and management practice. © 2023 The Authors. Journal of Management Studies published by Society for the Advancement of Management Studies and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
... The proposed Affect-Cognitive Theory allows for a serious development of the nascent stream of behavioral strategy (Powell et al., 2011) providing the necessary assumptions that are able to intertwine human cognition, emotions, and social behavior for improving the strategic management of organizations. This answers the call for a theoretical contribution that is able to investigate the interplay between perceptual accuracy, social constructionist processes, and decision outcomes (Healey, Hodgkinson, & Massaro, 2018;Maule & Hodgkinson, 2003). Moreover, thanks to the inclusion within the framework of affective states and their adapting formation; here, the concept of decision makers as "cognizers" (Calori, Johnson, & Sarnin, 1994) is shifted to an updated one in which they are conceived as "emotional cognizers", going beyond the thinking-feeling dichotomy often featured in the study of management decisions. ...
... This coevolving interpretation of situated cognition is also initially considered in the SSC update (Semin & Smith, 2013), in which it is strongly stated that cognitive processes generate behavior not only individually, but also in combination with dyads and groups, being subject and object of influences (in line with evolutionary and ecological psychology studies; see Gigerenzer & Selten, 2002). From that, and from the recent developments made in the study of the brain-emotioncognition relationship (Healey et al., 2018), individuals and their bodies act in a physical-social environment eliciting mental representations, determining the knowing and learning processes, which return to the environment e through behavior e when a judgment is made. Therefore, the environment is ultimately "a recipient of action as well as a supplier of inputs" (Smith & Semin, 2004, p. 77), among which there are memories (past information), which shed light on situational cues; this is in line with sensemaking studies in which information is not something that exists independently of and external to human beings, but rather is a product of human observation and interaction (Dervin, 1998). ...
I propose an Affect-Cognitive Theory to comprehensively understand how decisions occur in organizations. To this aim, I first review the assumptions of sensemaking and decision-making streams of research, especially the influence of bounded rationality, affective states and their relationships with cognition; then, I integrate them on the common basis of socially situated cognition. This new theory emphasizes the role of affective states in determining/being determined by cognition and its errors, pointing out decision makers’ affect as the result of multi-level adaptations to the physical and social environment. Management decisions are path dependent but not immutable; they, indeed, bank on the predominant feeling resulting from the modifying interactions and regulations of decision makers with their physical and social environment. Here, decision makers are proposed as “emotional cognizers” overcoming the thinking-feeling dichotomy that has often featured in the study of management decisions. This theory is beneficial for behavioral strategy, offering the needed assumptions to intertwine human cognition, emotions, and social behavior.
... Finally, an area of investigation that is likely to emerge in the next few years is research on emotions. Despite limited empirical research to date, researchers (Healey et al., 2017(Healey et al., , 2018 have proposed a framework that connects neuroscience to social and environmental forces as significant components of complex emotional organizational life. More recently, Massaro (2020) advanced a theoretical model based on the combination of organizational neuroscience and Affective Events Theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) and reviewed neuroscience research on emotions with a specific look at workplace phenomena. ...
Organizational neuroscience—a novel scholarly domain using neuroscience to inform
management and organizational research, and vice versa—is flourishing. Still missing,
however, is a comprehensive coverage of organizational neuroscience as a self-standing
scientific field. A foundational account of the potential that neuroscience holds to advance
management and organizational research is currently a gap. The gap can be addressed with a review of the main methods, systematizing the existing scholarly literature in the field
including entrepreneurship, strategic management, and organizational behavior, among
others.
This study represents one of the earliest attempts at providing a complete scientometric mapping and a systematic review of the nascent field of neurostrategy. Machine-based algorithms and text-mining have been used to – (a) clarify the dominant concepts at the junction of neuroscience and strategic management; (b) identify the ontological and epistemological foundations of neurostrategy; (c) explain how the scholarly discourse around neurostrategy has evolved; (d) reveal the trends that are gaining traction within neurostrategy research; and (e) develop propositions at the confluence of managerial capabilities, knowledge management, dynamic capabilities, and neurostrategy. The study unveils how neurostrategy represents a quintet of disciplines and lays bare the hypes and hopes surrounding neurostrategy. The study explains how the road that leads to competitive success passes through the development of neuronally intelligent strategies that not only resolve the battle between the organization and its people, but also the one within an organizational decision maker.
Why is that presentations on “neuro-entrepreneurship” are so well-attended (and seemingly applauded) yet little traction has really occurred? Meanwhile, why it was that in entrepreneurship we hear a regular drumbeat calling for nurturing the entrepreneurial mindset yet we see little progress in rigorously defining that. Nor do we see much progress is applying what we do know. The potential is significant; it seems that every issue of a neuroscience journal offers something that speaks to entrepreneurship and related phenomena. Could it be that we need to bring together the best thinkers and doers around this topic and learn from each other? This symposium intends to do just that. We have convened a diverse set of scholars, both rising and veteran, from Europe, Asia, and North America offering very differing perspectives on moving neuroentrepreneurship forward.
神经组织行为学是指通过探究组织现象背后的生物学运作机理, 从神经生理视角发展并重构组织行 为学框架的新兴多领域交叉学科。多维范式下的神经组织行为学包括从还原论到涌现论的哲学基础, 基于社 会情境认知理论、跨层次研究和逆向推理的理论框架, 以及神经成像法和 ANS 测量法并行的研究方法。未来 研究应注意神经组织行为学可能给组织理论带来的变革, 以及研究方法的未来走向。
This paper advances current understandings of why and how neuroimaging can enrich the study of entrepreneurship. We discuss the foundations of this cross-disciplinary research area and its evolving boundaries, focusing on explaining and providing actionable insights on how two of the most widely used brain-imaging methods can be leveraged for use in entrepreneurship research. We provide guidelines aimed to equip entrepreneurship scholars with the fundamentals needed to design and evaluate research involving these neuroscience instruments. In so doing, we delineate examples related to entrepreneurial cognition and propose several ways in which this domain of research can be enhanced with neuroimaging.
In book: Cambridge Handbook of Workplace Affect
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
This work contributes to research in workplace affect by presenting an Organizational Neuroscience perspective on emotions. Methodological motivations are explored and a theoretical parallel drawn between Affective Event Theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) and neural circuitries of information processing. Neuroscience research relevant to the organizational affective literature is then explained by covering the broad domains of intra-individual and inter-personal affect. Topics addressed include basic emotions, emotional contagion, and emotional intelligence, among others. Suggestions for future research emerge at the end. Massaro S. (2019). The Organizational Neuroscience of Emotions. In: The Cambridge Handbook of Workplace Affect; Eds.: Yang L., Cropanzano R.S., Daus C., & Tur V.A.M.; Chapter 3, Cambridge University Press
Scholars have studied emotions and affect in organizational settings for over twenty years, providing numerous insights into how organizations and the people who work in them behave. With such a rich accumulation of knowledge, the time seemed right to call for today's scholars of management to propose new and exciting theory. The eight articles in this special topic forum address topics that cross multiple levels of analysis and include a range of different theories, explicating how anger and fear can spark productivity, how employees respond to abusive supervision over time, how leadermember exchanges are shaped by affective events, the social functions of emotional complexity for leaders, team entrepreneurial passion, the effects of institutional beliefs on emotional displays, the nexus of affective climate and organizational effectiveness, and the role of gratitude in organizations. In this introduction we briefly summarize the main points from each article and discuss new research directions arising from the articles. To spur even deeper research into this important and still unfolding field of discovery, and stimulated by the articles in this special topic forum, we conclude with additional thoughts and ideas on the role of emotions and affect in organizations.
Recently, the application of neuroscience methods and findings to the study of organizational phenomena has gained significant interest and converged in the emerging field of organizational neuroscience. Yet, this body of research has principally focused on the brain, often overlooking fuller analysis of the activities of the human nervous system and associated methods available to assess them. In this article, we aim to narrow this gap by reviewing heart rate variability (HRV) analysis, which is that set of methods assessing beat-to-beat changes in the heart rhythm over time, used to draw inference on the outflow of the autonomic nervous system (ANS). In addition to anatomo-physiological and detailed methodological considerations, we discuss related theoretical, ethical, and practical implications. Overall, we argue that this methodology offers the opportunity not only to inform on a wealth of constructs relevant for management inquiries but also to advance the overarching organizational neuroscience research agenda and its ecological validity.
According to deontic justice theory, individuals often feel principled moral obligations to uphold norms of justice. That is, standards of justice can be valued for their own sake, even apart from serving self-interested goals. While a growing body of evidence in business ethics supports the notion of deontic justice, skepticism remains. This hesitation results, at least in part, from the absence of a coherent framework for explaining how individuals produce and experience deontic justice. To address this need, we argue that a compelling, yet still missing, step is to gain further understanding into the underlying neural and psychological mechanisms of deontic justice. Here, we advance a theoretical model that disentangles three key processes of deontic justice: The use of justice rules to assess events, cognitive empathy, and affective empathy. Together with reviewing neural systems supporting these processes, broader implications of our model for business ethics scholarship are discussed.
The State of Personnel Selection Research An Expanded Problem Space: Selection to Differentiate the Firm Directions for Future Research Conclusion Acknowledgments References
Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors' mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors' mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.
The phenomenon of empathy entails the ability to share the affective experiences of others. In recent years social neuroscience made considerable progress in revealing the mechanisms that enable a person to feel what another is feeling. The present review provides an in-depth and critical discussion of these findings. Consistent evidence shows that sharing the emotions of others is associated with activation in neural structures that are also active during the first-hand experience of that emotion. Part of the neural activation shared between self- and other-related experiences seems to be rather automatically activated. However, recent studies also show that empathy is a highly flexible phenomenon, and that vicarious responses are malleable with respect to a number of factors--such as contextual appraisal, the interpersonal relationship between empathizer and other, or the perspective adopted during observation of the other. Future investigations are needed to provide more detailed insights into these factors and their neural underpinnings. Questions such as whether individual differences in empathy can be explained by stable personality traits, whether we can train ourselves to be more empathic, and how empathy relates to prosocial behavior are of utmost relevance for both science and society.
Drawing on dual-systems theory, we propose a new typology for analyzing shared cognition in work groups and teams that differentiates reflective (i.e. C-system) mental models formed through reasoning and deliberation from reflexive (i.e. X-system) representations that are more automatic, intuitive, and affective in nature. Our analysis demonstrates how team members' X-system representations pertaining to the team's task and its members can compete with shared C-system mental models of the task and team in terms of their respective effects on team functioning. We highlight the consequences for intra-team coordination when: (i) team members have similar C-system mental models but dissimilar X-system representations (illusory concordance) and (ii) team members have similar X-system representations but dissimilar C-system mental models (surface discordance). Finally, we consider the implications of our arguments for extending current team cognition theory predicated on reflective cognition and suggest new directions for research on group cognition in organizations more generally.
Organizational neuroscience has great promise for advancing organizational research and practice. The field, however, is developing rapidly and has also become the subject of technological and methodological challenges that must be considered when conducting or interpreting neuroscience research as applied to organizational behavior. We explore four issues we deem to be important in understanding the role of neuroscience in organizational behavior research: (i) neuroscientific research and reductionism; (ii) the need to address methodological and technological challenges in conducting this type of research; (iii) how neuroscientific research is meaningful in organizations (the “So what?” issue); and (iv) neuroscience as just another management fad. In addressing these issues, we hope to set out a roadmap that will enable organizational scholars to avoid past mistakes and thus serve to advance multidisciplinary research in organizational behavior using neuroscientific approaches. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Stimulated by the growing use of brain imaging and related neurophysiological techniques in psychology and economics, scholars have begun to debate the implications of neuroscience for management and organization studies (MOS). Currently, this debate is polarizing scholarly opinion. At one extreme, advocates are calling for a new neuroscience of organizations, which they claim will revolutionize understanding of a wide range of key processes, with significant implications for management practice. At the other extreme, detractors are decrying the relevance of neuroscience for MOS, primarily on philosophical and ethical grounds. The present article progresses this debate by outlining an intermediate, critical realist position, in which the insights of social neuroscience are one of a number of convergent building blocks that together point toward the need for a more embodied and socially situated view of cognition in management and organizations.
Psychological research during the 20th century championed psychoanalysis, behaviorism, and the cognitive sciences-all of which emphasized individualism. This research focus mirrored Western society, which saw advocates of individualism, such as Ayn Rand, Richard Dawkins, and Milton Friedman, elevated to celebrity status. In this context, it is easy to forget that humans are obligatorily a social species who, by definition, create emergent organizations beyond the individual-structures ranging from dyads and families to groups, communities, and cultures. These emergent structures evolved hand in hand with neural, neuroendocrine, cellular, and genetic mechanisms to support them because the consequent social behaviors helped these organisms survive, reproduce, and care for offspring sufficiently long that they too reproduced. Social neuroscience is an interdisciplinary field of research that has emerged over the past two decades to investigate these mechanisms and the social structures, factors, and processes with which they interface.
It is often said that being a good strategist requires keeping a cool head. However, eradicating emotional influences from the strategy process is not only infeasible, it is also undesirable. Drawing on the latest advances in the science of emotion, this article explains how emotion regulation is an essential skill that executives must cultivate to ensure that their enterprises are able to adapt effectively in these turbulent times. The authors offer practical steps to help executives manage better the emotional dynamics of strategizing, which left unchecked can derail even the most carefully orchestrated of strategy processes.
We revisit the psychological underpinnings of Teece's (2007) framework of dynamic capabilities development in the light of advances in social cognitive neuroscience and neuroeconomics. We argue that dynamic capabilities are based on a blend of effortful forms of analysis and the skilled utilization of less deliberative, intuitive processes, which enables firms to harness managers' cognitive and emotional capacities.
In this critical essay, we respond to Lindebaum’s argument that neuroscientific methodologies and data have been accepted prematurely in proposing novel management theory. We acknowledge that building new management theories requires firm foundations. We also find his distinction between demand and supply-side forces helpful as an analytical framework identifying the momentum for the contemporary production of management theory. Nevertheless, some of the arguments Lindebaum puts forward, on closer inspection, can be contested, especially those related to the supply side of organizational cognitive neuroscience research: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) data, motherhood statements and ethical concerns. We put forward a more positive case for organizational cognitive neuroscience methodologies and data, as well as clarifying exactly what organizational cognitive neuroscience really means, and its consequences for the development of strong management theory.
This article explores the difference between learning in an organization and organizational learning. I construct a conceptual framework for understanding organizational learning at an organizational level of analysis. This framework is based on the proposition that organizational learning is visible in the organizational dynamics created from the interaction between politics (power relations) and emotion within an organization. Using a combination of psychodynamic theory and reflections on the politics of organizing I develop the idea that organizations are learning when the 'establishment' that is being created through the very process of organizing can be identified and critically reflected upon. I use a case example of a change initiative within Hyder PLC, a multinational company, to identify organizational dynamics that limit organizational learning. In the final part of the article, I discuss the conclusions that emerged from the case example and the implications of these conclusions for the theory and practice of organizational learning.
Beginning in the 1990s and following decades of neglect, what came to be referred to as the Affective Revolution has radically transformed our understanding of the role played by emotion in organizational psychology and organizational behavior (OPOB). In this article, we review the field of emotion in the workplace from different perspectives, corresponding to five discrete levels of analysis: (a) within-person temporal effects, (b) between-person (personality and attitudes) factors, (c) interpersonal behaviors (perception and communication of emotion), (d) group level (leadership and teams), and (e) organizational level (culture and climate). Within these perspectives, we address the importance of affective events theory (AET) and its interaction with emotional intelligence, emotional labor, and emotional contagion, as well as the role of emotion in leadership and organizational culture and climate. We conclude by presenting an integrative model that shows how the five levels are linked, followed by disc...
In this review, we consider the advent of neuroscience in management and organizational research. We organize our review around two general themes pertaining to how areas of the brain may be relevant to management and organizational behavior. First, intrinsic, at-rest activity in the brain provides trait-like information that can be used to better understand individuals in terms of cognition, emotions, and behaviors. Second, reflexive activity involves an understanding of the brain in terms of its state-like responses to stimuli. In our review, we identify several research challenges and opportunities, such as the need to consider the theoretical basis of neural concepts and measures and the use of team-based neuroscience technologies. In addition, although research in organizational neuroscience is relatively new, some interesting practical implications are raised here. We conclude with a consideration of key limitations, specifically the possibility of excessive reductionism, as well as ethical and professional issues.
A comparative model of organizations as interpretation systems is proposed. The model describes four interpretation modes: enacting, discovering, undirected viewing, and conditioned viewing. Each mode is determined by (1) management's beliefs about the environment and (2) organizational intrusiveness. Interpretation modes are hypothesized to be associated with organizational differences in environmental scanning, equivocality reduction, strategy, and decision making.
Historically, the lack of availability and prohibitive expense of brain imaging technology have limited the application of neuroscience research in organizational settings. However, recent advances in technology have made it possible to use brain imaging in organizational settings at relatively little expense and in a practical manner to further research efforts. In this article, we weigh the advantages and disadvantages of neuroscience applications to organizational research. Further, we present three key methodological issues that need to be considered with regard to such applications: (a) level of assessment, (b) intrinsic versus reflexive brain activity, and (c) the targeting of brain region(s) or networks. We also pose specific examples of how neuroscience may be applied to various topical areas in organizational behavior research at both individual and team levels.
The authors report the results of 2 studies conducted to measure the cognitive structures underlying perceived competitive relationships among retailing firms in a small city. Drawing from recent research on cognitive categorization, they first discuss the theoretical importance of studying subjective rivalry and then explain how categorization processes influence perceived competitive boundaries among firms. The results of Study 1 suggest that cognitive categories of firms are perceived to be largely independent sets of organizations. The results of Study 2 suggest that middle-level categories represent a psychological inflection point differentiating rivals from nonrivals. The authors discuss the implications of these data for studying how managers make sense of competitive structures.
If humans are purely physical, and the brain does the work formerly assigned to the mind or soul, then how can it fail to be the case that our thoughts and actions are determined by the laws of neurobiology, and that free will, moral responsibility, and reason itself are in jeopardy? Bringing together insights from both philosophy and neuroscience, this book defends a non-reductive version of physicalism whereby humans are (sometimes) the authors of their own thoughts and actions. One resource is an account of mind as embodied and constituted by action-feedback-evaluation-action loops in the environment, 'scaffolded' by culture. Another is a non-mysterious account of downward (mental) causation explained in terms of a complex, higher-order system exercising constraints on lower-level processes. These resources are utilized to take on two problems in philosophy of mind: the meaningfulness of language, and the causal efficacy of the mental. Solutions to these problems are a prerequisite to addressing the central problem of the book: how can biological organisms be free and morally responsible? The book argues that the real problem is not neurobiological determinism, but neurobiological reductionism. The relevant question is whether humans, as whole persons, exert downward causation over some of their own parts and processes. If all organisms do this to some extent, what needs to be added to this animalian flexibility to constitute free and responsible action? The keys are sophisticated language and hierarchically ordered cognitive processes allowing (mature) humans to evaluate their own actions, motives, goals, and moral principles.
This chapter overviews how neuroscience can provide a new lens to understand leadership processes in organizations. We describe how neurological scanning can be applied to leadership research, as well as its potential advantages over more traditional techniques, such as surveys. Research to date is summarized pertaining to how neuroscience can inform such conceptualizations as transformational, complex/adaptive, and ethical forms of leadership. Findings indicate that effective versus not-so-effective leaders can be distinguished neurologically, and such assessment can benefit the prediction of important leadership outcomes. We caution that context needs to be taken into account in that not only can neurological variables associated with leaders affect organizational behavior and outcomes, but it is equally important to understand how the context can affect neurological qualities of individuals. Finally, we describe how it may be possible to use neurofeedback techniques to help develop leadership qualities of people in industry and in education programs, such as those in business schools.
Emotions and affect continue to garner widespread interest in the organizational sciences, and psychometric instruments tend to be the most often utilized method of assessing emotional phenomena in the workplace. However, psychometric questionnaires/surveys suffer from various shortcomings in that they may not adequately capture the underlying emotional experiences of individuals for various reasons (such as social desirability, lack of awareness, political posturing, and so forth). Neuroscience approaches allow researchers to directly assess the underlying neural activity that is occurring inside individuals’ brains. Accordingly, neuroscience can help researchers to overcome some of the limitations of surveys, thus allowing for both broader conceptualization and measurement. We briefly discuss the various neuroscience methodologies that can be used to help researchers gain insight into how individuals in the workplace experience emotions. Our discussion targets emotional contagion and emotional regulation as two areas that could especially benefit from utilizing a neuroscientific approach. We end the chapter with a consideration of practical implications.
For organizational neuroscience to progress, it requires an overarching theoretical framework that locates neural processes appropriately within the wider context of organizational cognitive activities. In this chapter, we argue the case for building such a framework on two foundations: (1) critical realism, and (2) socially situated cognition. Critical realism holds to the importance of identifying biophysical roots for organizational activity (including neurophysiological processes) while acknowledging the top-down influence of higher-level, emergent organizational phenomena such as routines and structures, thereby avoiding the trap of reductionism. Socially situated cognition connects the brain, body, and mind to social, cultural, and environmental forces, as significant components of complex organizational systems. By focusing on adaptive action as the primary explanandum, socially situated cognition posits that, although the brain plays a driving role in adaptive organizational activity, this activity also relies on the body, situational context, and cognitive processes that are distributed across organizational agents and artifacts. The value of the framework that we sketch out is twofold. First, it promises to help organizational neuroscience become more than an arena for validating basic neuroscience concepts, enabling organizational researchers to backfill into social neuroscience, by identifying unique relations between the brain and social organization. Second, it promises to build deeper connections between neuroscience and mainstream theories of organizational behavior, by advancing models of managerial and organizational cognition that are biologically informed and socially situated.
What was noted by E. J. Langer (1978) remains true today; that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did E. J. Langer, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and behavior. Three major forms of automatic self-regulation are identified: an automatic effect of perception on action, automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evaluation of one's experience. From the accumulating evidence, the authors conclude that these various nonconscious mental systems perform the lion's share of the self-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individual grounded in his or her current environment.
Introduction: what the brain's-eye view tells the mind's-eye view. Part 1 The mind's-eye view: classical cognitivism situation and substance folk psychology, thought, and context biological constraints. Part 2 The brain's-eye view: parallel distributed processing informational holism the multiplicity of mind - a limited defence of classical cognitivism structured through reassembling the jigsaw. Epilogue: The parable of the high-level architect. Appendix: Beyond eliminativism.
Organizational scholars have begun to explore the links between cognitive neuroscience and strategic organization (Becker and Cropanzano, 2010; Powell, 2011; Senior et al., 2011). The jury is still out, but scholars seem to agree that brain science will enhance our understanding of individual and social cognition in organizations. A neglected fact about brain technologies is that they perform some of the same tasks as organizational ones. For example, people who have been taught about their own brain images have better behavioral self-control than people who have not. To the extent that the devices of strategic organization – formal structure, processes and incentives – are technologies for controlling individual behavior, brain technologies may offer an effective substitute for strategic organization. In the long run, we may see more brain science and less organization structure. Replacing organization structure with brain science may seem far-fetched and Orwellian, and it probably is – but then again, a lot of what goes on in organizations is like that. If we have learned anything from experience, it is that organizations have no aversions to fulfilling Orwellian prophecies, whether they involve bureaucracy, technology, psychological testing, or employee surveillance. Controlling individual behavior is something that organizations already do and the question is whether brain science can help them do it better.
In this essay, we explore whether it is feasible to replace some forms of strategic organization with brain technologies, focusing particularly on technologies for behavioral self-control. We do not go deeply into the moral implications of these technologies, though we are concerned about them. We focus on recent developments in cognitive neuroscience and take it as given that moral considerations rather than technical efficiency should govern the use of technologies, including those involving the human brain. Brain science has the potential to make our lives better or worse, and we hope that this essay stimulates debate on the use of brain science in organizations.
We set out to address a gap in the management literature by proposing a framework specifying the component capacities organizational actors require to think and act morally. We examine how moral maturation (i.e., moral identity, complexity, and metacognitive ability) and moral conation (i.e., moral courage, efficacy, and ownership) enhance an individual's moral cognition and propensity to take ethical action. We offer propositions to guide future research and discuss the implications of the proposed model for management theory and practice.
This paper develops a new theoretical model with which to examine the interaction between technology and organizations. Early research studies assumed technology to be an objective, external force that would have deterministic impacts on organizational properties such as structure. Later researchers focused on the human aspect of technology, seeing it as the outcome of strategic choice and social action. This paper suggests that either view is incomplete, and proposes a reconceptualization of technology that takes both perspectives into account. A theoretical model—the structurational model of technology—is built on the basis of this new conceptualization, and its workings explored through discussion of a field study of information technology. The paper suggests that the reformulation of the technology concept and the structurational model of technology allow a deeper and more dialectical understanding of the interaction between technology and organizations. This understanding provides insight into the limits and opportunities of human choice, technology development and use, and organizational design. Implications for future research of the new concept of technology and the structurational model of technology are discussed.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson take on the daunting task of rebuilding Western philosophy in alignment with three fundamental lessons from cognitive science: The mind is inherently embodied, thought is mostly unconscious, and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. Why so daunting? "Cognitive science--the empirical study of the mind--calls upon us to create a new, empirically responsible philosophy, a philosophy consistent with empirical discoveries about the nature of mind," they write. "A serious appreciation of cognitive science requires us to rethink philosophy from the beginning, in a way that would put it more in touch with the reality of how we think." In other words, no Platonic forms, no Cartesian mind-body duality, no Kantian pure logic. Even Noam Chomsky's generative linguistics is revealed under scrutiny to have substantial problems.
Parts of Philosophy in the Flesh retrace the ground covered in the authors' earlier Metaphors We Live By , which revealed how we deal with abstract concepts through metaphor. (The previous sentence, for example, relies on the metaphors "Knowledge is a place" and "Knowing is seeing" to make its point.) Here they reveal the metaphorical underpinnings of basic philosophical concepts like time, causality--even morality--demonstrating how these metaphors are rooted in our embodied experiences. They repropose philosophy as an attempt to perfect such conceptual metaphors so that we can understand how our thought processes shape our experience; they even make a tentative effort toward rescuing spirituality from the heavy blows dealt by the disproving of the disembodied mind or "soul" by reimagining "transcendence" as "imaginative empathetic projection." Their source list is helpfully arranged by subject matter, making it easier to follow up on their citations. If you enjoyed the mental workout from Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works , Lakoff and Johnson will, to pursue the "Learning is exercise" metaphor, take you to the next level of training. --Ron Hogan Two leading thinkers offer a blueprint for a new philosophy.
"Their ambition is massive, their argument important.…The authors engage in a sort of metaphorical genome project, attempting to delineate the genetic code of human thought." -The New York Times Book Review
"This book will be an instant academic best-seller." -Mark Turner, University of Maryland
This is philosophy as it has never been seen before. Lakoff and Johnson show that a philosophy responsible to the science of the mind offers a radically new and detailed understandings of what a person is. After first describing the philosophical stance that must follow from taking cognitive science seriously, they re-examine the basic concepts of the mind, time, causation, morality, and the self; then they rethink a host of philosophical traditions, from the classical Greeks through Kantian morality through modern analytical philosophy.
When historian Charles Weiner found pages of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman's notes, he saw it as a "record" of Feynman's work. Feynman himself, however, insisted that the notes were not a record but the work itself. In Supersizing the Mind, Andy Clark argues that our thinking doesn't happen only in our heads but that "certain forms of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feed-around loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and world." The pen and paper of Feynman's thought are just such feedback loops, physical machinery that shape the flow of thought and enlarge the boundaries of mind. Drawing upon recent work in psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, robotics, human-computer systems, and beyond, Supersizing the Mind offers both a tour of the emerging cognitive landscape and a sustained argument in favor of a conception of mind that is extended rather than "brain- bound." The importance of this new perspective is profound. If our minds themselves can include aspects of our social and physical environments, then the kinds of social and physical environments we create can reconfigure our minds and our capacity for thought and reason.
How do business organizations make decisions? What process do they follow in deciding how much to produce? And at what price? A behavioral theory of the firm is here explored. Using a specific type of duopoly, a model is written explicity as a computer program to deal with the complex theory implicit in the process by which businesses make decisions. This model highlights our need for more empirical observations of organizational decision-making.
