How Leaders Can Optimize Teams’ Emotional Landscapes

Employees bring a diversity of moods to work each day. Trying to smooth them out into one shared mood isn’t always the best idea.

Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, Christina Bradley, and Lindred Greer

January 04, 2021

Emotions are running high. The disruptive events characterizing 2020 — a global pandemic, climate-related disasters, economic uncertainty, and social discontent — are leading employees to bring a higher level of emotionality to work than ever before. This is clashing with the culturally ingrained norm that an appropriate “professional” demeanor minimizes emotional expression.

At the same time, work on emotional suppression suggests that there are long-term costs to keeping emotions buried ...