Most companies don't realize how central emotions are to building the right culture. They tend to focus on cognitive culture: the shared intellectual values, norms, artifacts, and assumptions that set the overall tone for how employees think and behave at work. Though that's incredibly important, the authors' research shows that it's only part of the story. The other critical part is emotional culture, which governs which feelings people have and express at work. Barsade and O'Neill have found that emotional culture influences employee satisfaction, burnout, teamwork, and even "hard" measures such as financial performance and absenteeism. So when managers ignore or fail to understand it, they're glossing over a vital component of what makes organizations tick, and their companies suffer as a result. By not only allowing emotions into the workplace but also consciously shaping them, leaders can better motivate their employees. This article describes some of the ways emotional culture manifests at work-for instance, in the form of joy, companionate love, and fear-and the impact it can have in a range of settings and industries. It also suggests ways of creating and maintaining an emotional culture that will help you achieve your company's goals.

Coming up with fresh ideas for new or existing products, services and processes is widely recognized as the key to enduring economic advantage, and as a result, employee creativity has taken center stage in discussions of innovation. But how can creativity be actively fostered and sustained in the workplace? Paying attention to employee emotions is critical, say the authors. Organizations are emotion-laden environments, and while research has begun to validate affective (i.e. emotional) influences on a number of work outcomes (including task quality, productivity and efficiency), little is known about how naturally-occurring affective experiences in the flow of our daily work lives relate to creative thinking on the job. The authors show that the emotion-creativity system is a cycle, whereby influences at any point can begin a dynamic pattern of increasing or decreasing positive affect and creativity.