BUS272 TB

66 Part 1 Understanding the Workplace
on the application of techniques needs to be done to help employees. 152 Thus, while
there is much promise in emotion regulation techniques, the best route to a positive
workplace is to recruit positive-minded individuals and to train leaders to manage their
moods, job attitudes, and performance. 153 The best leaders manage emotions as much
as they do tasks and activities. Although with computers now being programmed to
read emotions, as OB in the Workplace indicates, it may be harder to hide emotions at
work in the future.
OB IN THE WORKPLACE
Affective Computing: Reading Your State of Mind
Can computers really recognize a user’s emotions? The Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) Media Lab is currently programming computers to use 24 facial
points from which they can infer an emotion. 154 What if computers could be made
emotionally intelligent to help a person get past frustration into productivity? What if
managers could automatically receive reports on virtual employees’ emotions? What
if sensors could help employees stay well by providing feedback on their emotional
reactions to stress?
Affective computing can provide managers with in-the-moment help. At MIT’s lab, a
tiny traffic light, visible only to the wearer, flashes yellow when a listener’s face indicates
lack of engagement in the conversation and red for complete disengagement. These cues
could help a manager who is delivering important safety information to an employee,
for instance. The MIT team has also developed wristbands that sense emotional states
and activity levels. They could help managers work with employees who are on the
Asperger’s or autism spectrum. “With this technology in the future, we’ll be able to
understand things . . . that we weren’t able to see before, things that calm them, things
that stress them,” said Rosalind Picard, the team’s director.
With this possibility comes responsibility, of course. Obvious ethical issues will
only grow with the technology’s increasing sophistication. Employees may not want
computers to read their emotions either for their managers’ use or for automatic feedback.
“We want to have some control over how we display ourselves to others,” said
Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute.
Organizations will eventually have to decide when it is appropriate to read
employees’ emotions, as well as which emotions to read. In the meantime, according
to affective computing experts, people are still the best readers of emotions from facial
cues. Perhaps managers can get to know their employees’ state of mind by paying closer
attention to those cues.
Perception
GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS
In considering potential global differences in this chapter’s concepts, let’s
look at the four areas that have attracted the most research: (1) perception,
(2) attributions, (3) personality, and (4) emotions.
Several studies have examined how people observe the world around them. 155 In one
study, researchers showed East Asians and US subjects a photo with a focal object (like
a train) with a busy background and tracked their eye movements. They found that the