July 2010 Newsletter
As a management consultant in the early 1990s, it
seemed vaccinations might be required to protect against the apparent plague of
motivational posters that seemed to pop up at every client site.
These posters still adorn the
walls at some businesses, well-intentioned and probably mostly ignored at this
point. You remember them, right? The distinctive typography, all capitalized
with the first and last letter in a larger font size. Photo inspiration via the
majesty of nature. Determination - a photo of a little sapling next to a big
pine tree with the quote "It is the size of one's will which will determine
success." Achievement - a picture of a man on top of a mountain juxtaposed
with the Teddy Roosevelt quote, "It is hard to fail,
but it is worse never to have tried to succeed." As I recall, there were an
inordinate number of trees and mountains.
Turns out they may have been onto something.
The goal of motivational posters, it would seem, is to subliminally inspire by
priming the brains of employees with positive affect.
Guess what?
There's evidence that priming (both positive and
negative) makes a
difference in teamwork and organizational behavior that employees and managers
aren't consciously aware of.
These ideas are touched upon in a great review article you might have missed
from last summer (published in the August 2009 Research in Organizational
Behavior - aren't all psychiatrists at the beach that month?) titled "Implicit
affect in organizations" by Sigal Barsade (at Wharton School of Business),
Lakshmi Ramarajan (Harvard Business School) and Drew Westen (Emory University).
The authors discuss the reasons why we should be
paying
attention, in effect, to the emotional unconscious (not in a strictly
Freudian sense) and provide a solid review of the neuroscience evidence for
implicit affect in its varying forms.
If your institution lacks direct access to the journal, here's a link:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleListURL&_method=list&_Articl
eListID=1379787236&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=
10&md5=24e4777e6a5b3265525cfd3b5f3b15d5
What does this mean for occupational and organizational psychiatrists? The
implications are both broad and deep. We know our patients and clients are not
always reliable narrators of what's happening for them, but the evidence cited
in this article can help us discuss with them how action on unconscious emotion
naturally happens and how to avoid being pulled down preconceived, unconscious
roads that lead to neither individual nor
organizational well-being.
-- Josh Gibson, M.D.
June 2010 Newsletter
As Psychiatrists we want our patients’
work to be fulfilling. Yet the work place can be tough to navigate, promoting
mental health most of the time but also with the potential to cause psychiatric
symptoms.
Performance appraisals regularly
affect almost everyone in the workplace -- from the loading dock to the C-suite.
When they work well, an individual gets information that helps to improve his or
her performance from year to year and companies get a sense of each person's
contribution to the business and its success.
Yet they are not a positive experience for
employees in many organizations. Employees receiving appraisals are frequently
demoralized, and those performing them know it.
Their
perennial arrival is greeted with the same enthusiasm as dandelions in spring.
Calls to eradicate performance appraisals arrive like Roundup with similar
predictability.
Consider the
following link to better understanding what your patients go through:
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/17/time-to-review-workplace-reviews/?th&emc=th
The comments section voices
what many patients are thinking about their boss, the performance appraisal
process and their organization. You may hear echoes as you listen to your
patients or ask about their work life.
What does this mean for
Occupational Psychiatry? As is true for any human endeavor, the challenge of
delivering effective feedback in the workplace will never be perfected, but it
is worth working to maximize its potential for individual and organizational
benefit. We—the Academy of Organizational and Occupational Psychiatry--are an
organization that thrives on dialogue and feedback.
--Daven Morrison
President, Academy of Organizational and
Occupational Psychiatry