Management Learning

This article argues that what and how learning takes place for managers is inextricably emotional, or of emotions. The traditional cognitive approach to management learning has obscured the presence and role of emotion. The conceptual positioning of emotion is reviewed, illustrated though `competencies' and `business ethics'. It is concluded that we need more explicit frameworks, derived from the wider organizational literature on emotion, to place emotion as both a product and process of learning. Special attention is required to the growth of corporate emotion engineering, flexible' work structures and `virtual' managing. These areas raise challenging technical and moral questions for `learning' theorists and practitioners.

This article argues that major organizational change precipitates social drama: a period of emotional and interpretative conflict. Stakeholders resolve it by sharing stories about unfolding events and more implicitly by identifying the plot. The plot is the dramatic logic of the drama, a template for future action. The plot gives actors a sense of how things will turn out in the end. Plots are rooted in feelings. Four plots and four storylines are identified as key processes through which actors frame organizational change. Plots and storylines enable and constrain the expression of emotion and help constitute action. When actors combine progressive or regressive plots and storylines, emotional momentum may develop. Emotional momentum underpins stakeholders' experiences of being on a positive or negative emotional roll. Actions taken during such rolls may have self-fulfilling characteristics. The influence of plots on senior managers' goals and stakeholders' learning, power and self-expression is explored in the article.

Literature and practice on learning in organizations often seem to ignore the expression of fear. This article explores the role of representations of fear in collective learning. Three expressions offers are analysed: by Pat, an individual whose workplace trials parallel those of the authors; by Ricardo Semler, Brazilian business executive, whose business autobiography, Maverick! some see as a manual for learning in organizations; and by W. Frank Blount, CEO of Australia's largest telecommunications firm, Telstra. These analyses bring to the fore issues of shame (Schneider), needs for mutual self-disclosure (Goffman) and conditions that cause us to `sanitize' representations of fear in ways that inhibit reflective practice and, hence, limit occurrence of episodes of deep, collective learning, that are termed here the `learning space'.

Based on an ethnography of recruiting methods, this article explains why Amway distributors attempt to generate strong and conflicting emotions among recruits (i.e. ambivalence) to facilitate learning. Case data are used to construct a three-stage model of the full unlearning and relearning cycle that is triggered by felt ambivalence. Thus, emotion is seen as a core element in changing the cognitions and behaviors of individuals and organizations. The micro- and macro-level implications of bridging the research on emotion and learning theories are discussed.