Fear at Work
Given the year that just was, it was inevitable that academic research would begin to reflect the dystopian nature of the times. Not long ago, there was a spring in the step of organizational scholarship. We talked in hyperbolic frenzies about positive organizational scholarship, about the possibility of work being transformative, about it being so much more than…well…just work. However, that feels very much in the past - those days appear to have gone the way of casual dining, handshakes and allowing people within 30 ft of your home.
It is important to approach this most recent round of academic doom-mongering with a degree of sobriety since academic research in organizations has often been reflective of societal sentiments. When things are good, our research tends to reflect the cruel emotions of hope and wide-eyed wonder. When things look bleak, well, we are happy to join the mood and bring things to a darker place. Of course, given the processes of academia and its glacial timelines for publication, there is a comforting offset in this delay - academia will indeed reflect the mood of the people…just a couple of years down the road once we grind things through the oft-maligned peer-review process (thanks, reviewer #2).
Right now, I’m no exception and am equally guilty of falling into the negative sentiment-laden trend of recent dour research endeavors. I’ve spent much of the past few months looking at the role of fear in the workplace. Now this is not the first time that I have…ahem…faced fear ; albeit in an academic sense. Courage and fear have a difficult and complex relationship. Much has been written on the interdependence of these constructs but most of this research adopts a “chicken and egg” approach to understanding the relationship. There are those that see fear as being the necessary pre-cursor to any courageous behavior and then there are those that champion fear as a natural by-product of positive moral action. As to whom might be correct? Well, that actually doesn’t matter as for the most part, one half will inevitably ignore the findings of the other in their pursuit of a string-theory of organizational morality and emotion.
However, what makes recent work on fear compelling is that attention is being drawn to the experience of fear at work. Much of what we know in the past has largely been concerned with the consequences of fear-laden workplaces and the toxic dangers of organizational cultures and climates where fear is used (intentionally and accidentally) as mechanisms of coercion and control. We have tended to look at dodgy outcome measures which claim to understand what happens when we work under the shadow of fear. Yet there is shift in tone these days - there is a willingness within organizations to explore the experience of fear among their employees. At this junction it is important to state that this is not because the contemporary workforce is paralyzed by fear within work (but in truth we don’t have any good evidence to direct us on this matter). Often the experience of fear is not so much generated by work but by a fear of not working.
An organization who shared their internal HR data with me, recently reported that 35% of their employees experienced fear as an emotion on a daily basis with about half of those people citing the fear of NOT having their job as being the source of the largely negative affect. That needs some attention - Are organizations being populated by those who experience fear at work because of their work and then also, by those who experience fear at work as the fear of not being able or allowed to work any longer? If so, then the literate largely (and consistently) fails us in helping understand the role of fear in our organizations. Can we accurately explore the role of fear in our workplaces if it can be experienced in such a dichotomy? The truth is we don’t have an answer nor do we even have a good question to get at that answer…well, not yet anyhow.
So with the help of some local organizations in Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area, I think it is time to start looking at the experience of fear at work. I have four organizations willing and suspiciously eager allow their employees to contribute their stories of fear - specifically, how they experience fear in the workplace. My hope is that this might be a first-step towards understanding if and how people experience fear in their workplace and to better understand the extent to which work is responsible for the creation and maintenance of said fear.
As the study design emerges, I will of course make it known and who knows, by this time next year, we might be looking back at the pandemic as a golden era of workplace optimism once we tap into the sentiment and experience of fear at work.