The Emotional Life of Organisations
I’ve recently published a historical article on the early history of a teacher training college, the themes of which have surprisingly contemporary relevance. One student’s observation, drawn from their diary, is particularly pertinent. They wrote: ‘Simmaries is not a building, nor lectures, nor fine or bad weather. It is a mental condition – the mutual feelings of the occupants of that building – the memory of corners in it, incidents that took place around and within’ (Saunders, Cusack and Parker, 2026, p.1).
The phrase ‘mental condition’ belongs to another age, but the insight is clear and strong: organisations and institutions are never simply structures through which work, study or other forms of activity are accomplished; they are communities of feeling, expectation and shared norms. They teach people how to belong, what to value, what may be spoken and what should remain unsaid.
Historians describe the study of such experiences as the history of emotions. Organisational psychologists, and organisations themselves, have become increasingly interested in similar questions: how communities of work, study and purpose shape the emotional lives of those within them (see for example Barsade and O’Neill, 2024).
How organisations shape emotional life
Organisations shape emotional life in at least two distinct ways: first, by establishing which emotions may be expressed and, second, by cultivating the emotions people are encouraged to feel. These processes often overlap, but they are not the same.
The first concerns permission. Every organisation develops tacit rules about which feelings may be spoken, displayed or acknowledged. Frustration may be acceptable in private but not in a meeting. Anxiety may be admitted by junior staff but not by senior leaders. Anger may be tolerated when expressed by someone with authority and judged inappropriate when voiced by someone with less power. Grief, uncertainty, disappointment or moral unease may be treated as legitimate responses, or as evidence that someone is insufficiently resilient, committed or professional.
People learn these rules quickly. They observe what happens when a colleague voices concern, challenges a decision or admits that they are struggling. They notice which emotions receive attention, which are redirected and which damage a person’s standing. In this sense, organisations create an emotional grammar. They do not necessarily determine what people feel, but they shape what can be said, to whom, in what form and with what consequences.
The second process is more active. Organisations do not merely regulate the expression of emotion; they also seek to cultivate particular feelings. Through language, ritual, leadership behaviour and repeated stories, they invite people to feel proud, grateful, loyal, ambitious, hopeful or urgent. A school may encourage a strong sense of vocation. A charity may seek to deepen identification with its cause. A university may cultivate pride in its history or status. A business undergoing rapid growth may generate excitement around pace, expansion and possibility.
This is not necessarily manipulative. Shared purpose often depends upon shared feeling. Institutions need forms of attachment if people are to invest themselves in common work. The St Mary’s students, for example, were not simply given rules about appropriate behaviour. Through worship, routines, songs, jokes, shared hardship and the identity of being a “Simmarian”, they were encouraged to experience loyalty, fellowship, vocation and Catholic belonging. Their formation involved the deliberate and informal cultivation of feeling, not merely the control of its expression.
The distinction matters because an organisation may permit one emotion while encouraging another. Staff may formally be allowed to express anxiety, while the prevailing culture continuously rewards confidence. A leadership team may say that disagreement is welcome, while its rituals and narratives generate strong feelings of loyalty that make dissent emotionally difficult. Employees may be encouraged to feel pride in the organisation while also being given little permission to express disappointment in its conduct.
The reverse can also occur. An organisation may encourage people to care deeply about its mission but provide few legitimate ways of expressing the grief, anger or frustration that such care inevitably produces. The more strongly people identify with the work, the more emotionally charged its failures may become. Yet precisely those feelings may be regarded as disruptive.
Language is one of the principal ways in which these emotional expectations are created. Phrases such as ‘we are one family’, ‘everyone needs to pull together’ or ‘we must remain positive’ do more than describe a situation. They propose an emotional posture. They tell people how they ought to relate to the organisation and to one another. Sometimes that posture is sustaining. At other times it narrows the range of responses that can be regarded as legitimate.
Rituals and routines perform similar work. Celebrations, assemblies, briefings and public expressions of gratitude help produce shared feeling. So do less conspicuous practices: the atmosphere of a meeting, the treatment of good or bad news, and the pace and style of communication all signal what people should feel and what they may safely reveal.
Stories are especially powerful. Every institution has narratives about the people who exemplify its values, the crises it has survived and the qualities that distinguish it from others. These stories create emotional identification. They invite admiration, pride, gratitude or obligation. They also teach people which emotional dispositions are desirable and likely to be rewarded.
The emotional life of an organisation is therefore shaped by both regulation and formation. Regulation concerns the boundaries placed around feeling and expression. Formation concerns the emotions, attachments and dispositions the organisation seeks to nurture. One asks, ‘What am I allowed to feel or say here?’ The other asks, ‘What am I being invited to feel?’
The two together matter because they help determine the kind of organisational community people inhabit. They shape not simply whether individuals feel comfortable, but how they understand loyalty, courage, care, ambition and responsibility. They influence which realities can be named and which identities become possible within the institution.
Becoming aware of the emotional culture
Emotional cultures are often difficult to perceive from within. Their expectations become familiar, absorbed into the everyday life of the organisation. What appears natural may, in fact, be learned. A leader may come to regard constant urgency as unavoidable, silence as agreement, confidence as competence, or exhaustion as evidence of commitment.
Awareness begins by noticing the emotional patterns that recur. What feelings are repeatedly generated in meetings, decision-making or periods of change? Which emotions are welcomed, and which are quickly contained or translated into more acceptable language? Who is permitted to express anger, uncertainty or disappointment, and whose expression of those feelings carries a cost?
Such awareness need not rely only on intuition. Barsade and O’Neill suggest that emotional culture can be explored through surveys, interviews and observation. Their approach is revealing because it does not simply ask people how they themselves feel. Instead, it asks what emotions they observe others expressing, which feelings appear acceptable, and which are better suppressed. They also attend to less formal evidence, including language, facial expression, posture, rituals, routines and the physical environment.
A survey of individual morale may tell leaders that people are anxious or disengaged. An inquiry into emotional culture asks a different question: what is it about this organisation that repeatedly produces, permits or discourages these emotional responses? It shifts attention from isolated feeling to shared pattern.
Leaders have particular influence here, although they do not exercise complete control over the emotional life of an organisation. Their responses to bad news, disagreement, hesitation and failure become signals to others. A leader who says that candour is valued but reacts defensively when challenged creates one kind of emotional culture. A leader who can remain present to anxiety without immediately dispersing or suppressing it creates another.
Coaching can offer a setting in which these patterns become more visible. A leader may arrive with what appears to be a personal concern, perhaps anxiety, frustration, tiredness or a loss of confidence. Sometimes the issue is primarily personal. At other times, the feeling may also disclose something about the wider organisation: an unspoken conflict, an inherited expectation, a culture of urgency, or a role in which too much emotion is being absorbed by one person.
The purpose is not to diagnose the organisation from a distance, nor to excuse the leader from responsibility. It is to develop greater awareness of what is being felt, what is being encouraged, what is being silenced and how the leader’s own responses may reinforce or alter the pattern.
The student who described St Mary’s as a ‘mental condition’ understood that institutions live in the feelings, memories and expectations of those who inhabit them. The same is true of contemporary organisations. They do not merely organise activity. They shape what may be expressed, what people are encouraged to feel and, over time, what kinds of belonging and identity become possible. Greater awareness of this emotional culture may help leaders respond with greater honesty, judgement and care.
References
Barsade, S. and O’Neill, O. (2024) Manage Your Emotional Culture, Harvard Business Review, Winter, pp.43-51.
Saunders, J., Cusack, A., and Parker, S.G. (2026) Becoming ‘Simmarians’: the beginnings of Catholic teacher education, homosocial community, and student formation at St Mary’s College, Hammersmith, c.1854–1914. British Catholic History. https://doi.org/10.1017/bch.2026.10071