Affective Laboratory

Affective management is not the issue only for the top managements. In order to practice the organization’s philosophy, principles, and strategies effectively, they should be shared among all members of the organization, including middle managements and employees in the fields. If the top managements emphasize affectiveness in their operations, this value system should be shared throughout the organization.

In affective management, potential affective responses on all stakeholders should be taken into considerations. Among them, the people who are considered to be more important comparable to customers are employees. Most of the managerial issues inside organizations have been discussed focusing on productivity and efficiency. On the other hand, issues such as climate of workplaces have generally got little attention in such a way that it is always better to maintain a good climate in workplace, though it was actually given lower priority than productivity.

Recent researches, however, have shown a number of new evidences suggesting that affective factors in workplaces have influence on productivity and creativity . In the near future when this fact is widely recognized, whether workers in the workplace can have positive affect may be another important criteria to evaluate workplaces in addition to quantitative efficiency and productivity. Then managers would be required to maintain good affective climate in their workplace as one of their management skills.

It is the emotional labor that managers have to pay particular attention to positive affects of employees. The emotional labor often demands heavily on workers’ mental health, and occasionally they may suffer from serious mental illness. In addition to mental cares such as coping, managerial supports in the workplace is said to be particular important in order to take care of these issues.

source: Umemuro, H. (2009). Affective technology, affective management, towards affective society. Proceedings of The 13th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI International 2009).