To
demonstrate the value of companionate love in the workplace, Barsade and
co-author Olivia “Mandy” O’Neill, assistant professor of management at George
Mason University, performed a 16-month longitudinal study at a long-term health
care facility involving 185 employees, 108 patients and 42 of those patients’
family members. Barsade and O’Neill set out to measure the effect of
companionate love on emotional and behavioral outcomes of employees, as well as
on health outcomes of patients and the satisfaction of those patients’ family
members. The results of their study are included in a paper titled, “What’s Love
Got to Do with It? A Longitudinal Study of the Culture of Companionate Love and
Employee and Client Outcomes in the Long-Term Care Setting,” which will be
published in an upcoming issue of Administrative Science Quarterly.
To
conduct their research, Barsade and O’Neill constructed a scale designed to
measure tenderness, compassion, affection and caring. But rather than simply
asking the participants if they felt or expressed those emotions themselves, the
researchers asked to what degree people saw their colleagues expressing them.
They also brought in independent raters to observe those four elements of the
facility’s culture, as well as asked family members to rate the culture. Last,
they added ratings of “cultural artifacts” (how the culture is displayed in the
physical environment) that reflect a culture of companionate love — for example,
having spaces with a “homey” environment, throwing birthday parties, etc. “We
have a very robust measurement consisting of all the possible lenses on the
culture of the unit,” Barsade says.
Our
field tends to focus on shared cognitions of people at work, yet an
understanding of shared emotions … can also have important outcomes for
organizations.–Sigal Barsade
This
study was among the few to focus on emotional culture rather than cognitive
culture, Barsade notes. “What we’re talking about is shared emotions. Our field
tends to focus on shared cognitions of people at work, yet an understanding of
shared emotions of people at work can also have important outcomes for
organizations.”
When
Love Is Infectious
Barsade
and O’Neill believed long-term care would be the ideal setting to test their
hypothesis that companionate love is a positive force in the workplace. “In
these facilities, you have people dealing with residents who are there for a
long time. You have employees who have chosen a caring industry,” Barsade says.
“So it was a natural first stop for looking at the concept of emotional culture.
Even though this has to do with how employees are treating each other, and not
necessarily how they are treating their clients, we argue that if they treat
each other with caring, compassion, tenderness and affection, that will spill
over to residents and their families.”
One
of the most significant findings in the study was that a culture of companionate
love reduces employees’ withdrawal from work. Barsade and O’Neill measured
employee withdrawal by surveying workers about their levels of emotional
exhaustion and by studying their rates of absenteeism. They found that units
with higher levels of companionate love had lower levels of absenteeism and
employee burnout. The researchers also discovered that a culture of companionate
love led to higher levels of employee engagement with their work via greater
teamwork and employee satisfaction.
This
could occur even with employees who don’t necessarily feel the high levels of
companionate love that exist in their units. “The view that dominated our field
for 20 years was that anytime you engage in emotional labor — meaning you’re
changing or regulating your emotions for a wage –that’s going to lead to
burnout,” Barsade says. “What we’re suggesting is that it’s more complicated
than that. It may well be that even if you don’t start out feeling the culture
of love — even if you’re just enacting it — it can lead to these positive
outcomes. In addition, there is the possibility that as you enact companionate
love, you will begin to feel it over time.”
Units
with higher levels of companionate love had lower levels of absenteeism and
employee burnout.
The
study also found that the culture of companionate love rippled out from staff to
influence patients and their families. “Certified nursing assistants rated the
mood of the residents, and the outside observers rated the culture. Those
outside observers could predict that [patients] would be in a better mood if the
culture among the staff was more loving,” Barsade says.
Barsade
and O’Neill measured patient quality of life based on 11 factors commonly used
to assess long-term care facilities, including comfort, dignity, satisfaction
with the food and spiritual fulfillment. Across the board, Barsade says, there
was a positive correlation between a culture of companionate love and patient
quality of life.
Interestingly,
however, when the researchers looked at the health outcomes of the patients,
they didn’t find as much of an impact of companionate love as they expected.
They measured three of the most critical outcomes for patients in long-term
care: unnecessary trips to the emergency room, weight gain and incidence of
ulcers from spending too much time in bed. They found that while a culture of
companionate love did lead to fewer trips to the ER, it didn’t affect weight or
ulcers.
“We
statistically controlled for factors such as general patient health, physical
functioning and degree of cognitive impairment, so it was quite a conservative
test,” Barsade says. “But health effects are not always directly seen. I
wouldn’t give up on it.”
Beyond
Health Care Settings
There
is one key question raised by Barsade’s and O’Neill’s research: Does
companionate love matter in workplaces that don’t revolve around providing love
and compassion to clients? To answer that question, they performed a second
study involving 3,201 employees in seven different industries. Using the same
scale they employed in the long-term care facility, the researchers found that a
culture of companionate love positively correlated with job satisfaction,
commitment to the company and accountability for performance.
The
relationships they found in the long-term care setting held steady. “What we
found is that companionate love does matter across a broad range of industries,
including those as diverse as real estate, finance and public utilities,”
O’Neill says. “But the interesting thing is that even though the overall
baseline of companionate love can differ across industries, there was as much of
a difference within industries as between industries. Overall, we found that —
regardless of the industry baseline — to the extent that there’s a greater
culture of companionate love, that culture is associated with greater
satisfaction, commitment and accountability.”
“What
we found is that companionate love does matter across a broad range of
industries, including those as diverse as real estate, finance and public
utilities.”–Olivia “Mandy” O’Neill
O’Neill
and Barsade believe that their initial findings in other industries argue for
further investigation. And additional studies are already underway. For example,
O’Neill is working with Wharton management professor Nancy Rothbard on a study
involving firefighters. “What we see is that companionate love acts as a helper
for the problems they struggle with at work and outside of work,” O’Neill says.
“For example, [firefighters] tend to have high levels of work-family conflict
because of the stress that comes from the job. Companionate love actually helps
to buffer the effect of job stress and work-family conflict on other
outcomes.”
Barsade
says her study in the long-term care facility has also inspired her to examine
the role of other aspects of emotional culture at work. “We don’t just have one
type of emotional culture,” she says. “We happen to be looking at a culture of
companionate love here. But you could have a culture of anger. You could have
culture of fear. You could have culture of joy. The natural second step is to
look at how these factors influence one another, and then to look at the whole
picture of how cognitive culture and emotional culture intersect.”
Already,
though, the research seems to be pointing to a strong message for managers in
all industries, Barsade says: tenderness, compassion, affection and caring
matter at work. “Management can do something about this,” she says. “They should
be thinking about the emotional culture. It starts with how they are treating
their own employees when they see them. Are they showing these kinds of
emotions? And it informs what kind of policies they put into place. This is
something that can definitely be very purposeful — not just something that rises
organically.”
