Existence and emotions – no romantic feelings in organisations
Contents
Existence and emotions – no romantic feelings in organisations
According to existential understanding, emotions are intentional, that is, they express and make us feel and understand that human beings are directed towards something. They tell us something about ourselves and others, and they are often felt in relation to the values and beliefs we hold. (cf. Hanaway 2020, 7 pp.). Even or especially when we cannot or will not follow them in our organisational roles.
While we are grounded and authentic, we all know that we do not always feel the same or act the same in every context. It is we who can choose to share and express different aspects of how we feel with different people in different contexts in very different ways.
This is why, in my view, the current widespread criticism of the ›virtue of authenticity‹, especially within the organisational debate dominated by systems theory, is largely justified (cf. Niermeyer, 2019; Kühl 2019)! This, however, only insofar as it has to serve as a ›wild card‹ for the critique of unjustifiable, erratic, driven or psychodynamic behaviour within organisations, to be out of character. – However, this kind of well‐founded critique, together with the prevailing reductionist conception of humanity, fails to take into account the actual nature of being human in organisations: this conception of the human being, insofar as it is conceptually the ›object‹ of consideration at all, assumes, at least implicitly, that we exclusively hunt for experiences of happiness, that we are driven by instincts and that we seek the tense and discharging sequence of experiences of a climax of homeostasis. – And, so it seems immanently logical to emphasise organisational structures so strongly within organisational studies and to focus on them and to conceptually de‐subjectivise organisations this way.
However, in my opinion, the criticism of the concept of authenticity, which has been voiced many times, and in many ways, is completely misplaced as soon as we deal with existential questions of being human within organisations and the more the behaviour‐restricting structures of organisations themselves erode and offer less supportive railings. – We ourselves can and will consider our behaviour appropriate when we shed a few tears in the face of a situation that deeply touches or offends us among friends, but would rather not choose to do so in the workplace (cf. Hanaway, 2020, ibid.). We can decide contextually and in adequacy to the role expectation (Bollnow, 1978) freely choose and relate to the situation and to ourselves and to whom we share our most intimate thoughts and desires and when. And we can identify those with whom we will only exchange superficial, insignificant and trivial things and only meet within roles. – So, tying back appropriate behaviour within roles within organisational circumstances, per se, does not justify questioning people’s authenticity and integrity. The reverse is true: Integrity is exclusively a question of context and the individual’s responsible position on specific role expectations. And within the organisational context, role can be understood, depending on the specific context, as a functionally conditioned composition of more or less specific expectations towards a person within a certain context (e.g., a task or position). And in a good traditional logotherapeutic and existential‐analytical sense of Viktor Frankl, ›role‹ is then to be understood as the inquiring facticity of a given section of the world vis‐à‐vis me, to which I as a person can relate in ›freedom and responsibility‹ in one way or another, but in any case, I must give an answer and take a stand. (On the so‐called »Copernican turn« in this regard, see Frankl, e.g., 2002, p. 141).
