The emotional imperative in administrative and leadership education

Citation

Samier, E.A. and Schmidt, M. (2010), "The emotional imperative in administrative and leadership education", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 48 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jea.2010.07448eaa.001

The emotional imperative in administrative and leadership education

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Educational Administration, Volume 48, Issue 5

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  Today, the brilliant and well-articulated idea of a just and rational society – the idea of socialism – has sustained a humiliating defeat. One of the main reasons it happened was that the intellectuals who created the idea did not take into account the nature of intellect itself. Intellect does not feel love. It does not feel physical pain. It is attracted to order and final solutions. Therefore, it is able to create any violent idea, including even the idea of self-destruction and the destruction of all living beings. “Just” and “rational” Soviet society buried itself in an ocean of blood, and then took three decades to swim to the surface again. Sixty-five million dead. Sixty-five million. Any future society based on an extremist conception of justice and rationality, on a final solution to social problems, will come to the same end (Mathematician/Physicist, Educator, Dissident, Prisoner, Exiled, Orlov, 1991, p. 8).

Orlov’s statement above describes the ultimate cost of rationality devoid of human feeling at its most hideous. Among these millions, during the purges of the late 1930s and early 1950s, were intellectuals including teachers and professors (not a few of whom were coconspirators). A vivid account is that of Ginzburg (1995), a school teacher who suffered prison camp, and was one of the lucky few who survived and able to document her experience. The lessons here when empathy and sympathy are suppressed are clear. The lack of humane feeling, that is, lack of engagement on an emotional level, is destructive; on a national level, combined with ideology, cult of personality and a state machine of violence, it can tear a society apart seemingly beyond repair.

On the other side, unbridled, unrestrained emotion can also be dangerous. It, too, requires boundaries. One form is “dark” charisma – when leadership consists largely of an uncritical affective bewitchment that can subvert or circumvent cultural mores, moral tenets, and legal norms. Charisma, ungrounded in any of these, can lead to self-destruction or the willingness to sacrifice others for one’s cause. Another is personality problems that generate destructive emotions.

Both of these extremes can exist on a lesser plane – the everyday life of many in schools and universities. The emotionless – usually rational – organisational pattern is bureaucratisation, deemed by Weber (1930) to be:

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  […] a materialization of mind is that living machine which bureaucratic organization represents, with its trained, specialized labor, its delimitation of areas of competence, its regulations and its hierarchically stratified relations of obedience. In union with the dead machine, it is laboring to produce the cage of that bondage of the future to which one day powerless men will be forced to submit like the fellaheen of ancient Egypt (Weber in Mommsen, 1984, p. 166).

A bureaucratised organisation is one staffed by technical experts, whom Weber (1930, p. 182) regarded as: “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved”. When pervasive in modernised societies, “disenchantment” occurs, leading inevitably to the “iron cage”. The limitations of this kind of “rational” model in management is explored by Cheryl L. Bolton and Fenwick W. English in this issue.

Equally, emotions unchecked on an everyday level can be just as damaging – leading or contributing to micropolitics, low morale, abuse of power, and a toxic culture within which to work. In universities, the erosion of collegial governance and collegial decision making can paralyse personal relations, programmes, teaching and research, effects that seem to be exacerbated by competition and entrepreneurialism in commercialised education. One form of unchecked emotions is the destructive narcissist pattern (DNP), receiving considerable attention in management studies, and examined by Eugenie A. Samier and Terryl Atkins here as it applies to educational administration and leadership.

In an earlier period of the field, from the 1950s through to the 1980s, when organisational behaviour was a staple of graduate programmes, emotions were dealt with through the work of Maslow, Herzberg, Horney, Skinner, etc. Theories about emotion were extensive, ranging from the somatic through the neurological, physiological, cognitive, and perceptual, drawing on intellectual traditions of existentialism, phenomenology, gestalt, psychoanalysis, and sociology. This included Goffman’s (1959) Interaction Ritual on symbolic interactionism, Arnold’s (1960) Emotion and Personality on phenomenology, neurology and physiology, Izard’s (1971) The Face of Emotion on the role that emotions play in motivation, and Frijda’s (1986) The Emotions that reviews the empirical evidence.

More recent attention, based on this foundation, has highlighted the role of emotions in management studies, such as Kets de Vries (2006, p. xxii). contention that: “without feelings there are no actions. Without feelings there is no passion. Everything important to human beings is affect-ridden”. Emotions play a far broader role in organisational life than generally acknowledged: much more of our “rational” behaviour is emotional motivated than we would probably like to admit, and requires a considerable investment in emotional labour as Janice Wallace demonstrates in her article in this issue. They can range not only from joy to anger, to envy and resentment, and to fear and distress but also many feelings associated with accomplishment such as satisfaction, disappointment, admiration, gratification, and pride. An overview can be found in a number of recent publications: Ashkenasy et al.’s (2000) Emotions in the Workplace, Fineman’s (1999) Studying Organizations, Payne and Cooper’s (2001) Emotions at Work, and Pinder’s (1998) Work Motivation in Organizational Behavior. Fineman’s (2000) Emotion in Organizations provides a collection of studies exploring the emotional medium in which we are embedded: narratives of compassion, relational experience in the workplace, emotional metaphors in cultural traditions, the commodification of emotion, aesthetic symbols that trigger emotional response, authenticity, ambivalence, morality and emotion, and injustice. Michalinos Zembylas’ article in this issue demonstrates the emotional requirements and costs in pursuing social justice in schools.

There are many aspects of graduate programmes for which an understanding and study of emotions is important in preparing people to hold positions of power and authority and understand subordinates’ emotional life and reactions, particularly fears related to organisational change, the consequences of government austerity that produce cutbacks, and entering the realm of private sector competition, discussed by Michèle J. Schmidt in her article. This includes the style of teaching, and curricular design. There are also contextual factors that can change emotional dynamics – the social complexities produced through internationalization, multiculturalism and equity – all issues Jill Blackmore pursues in her contribution. Emotion shapes meaning and understanding, and is a medium through which interpersonal relations are established. Culture is a major force in this realm that needs to be understood comparatively, as it establishes the range of emotion permissible and expected in the classroom and collegial relations.

It is also important in understanding the emotional dimensions of research activities: researchers use diaries to record subjective interpretation of events in order to contextualise their own experience and that of research subjects in interviews, particularly transient feelings that are not easily observed and measurable but still contain pattern and meaning (Brewerton and Millward, 2001, pp. 109-10). There are also many other emotions that, while positive in motivating the researcher, may cloud judgment such as enthusiasm that leads to intense engagement with the subjects and process in addition to many negative emotions such as frustration, the stress of deadlines leading to irritation and anger (Kvale, 1996, pp. 85-7). In many research traditions, friendship also causes problems with bias and subjectivity, difficulties with research subjects who are not friends, and research subjects, who through friendship, act in ways they assume the researcher wishes (Glesne, 2006, pp. 116-17). Strong emotional attachment to a research topic can preclude “the open, exploratory learner’s attitude that is necessary for good data collection and analysis”, either through negative emotions such as revenge, anxiety-producing, feelings of intimidation or too positive a passion (Glesne, 2006, pp. 23-4). It is, however, through one’s emotions that one becomes aware when subjectivity is engaged, which can serve an interpretive and critical purpose to re-examine assumptions and to shape new questions in qualitative research (Glesne, 2006, p. 120).

Eugenie A. Samier, Michèle SchmidtGuest Editors