Emotional Intelligence training in LucerneDeciding after an incident: can an unrelated emotion steer your choice?
After handling a difficult complaint, a manager may still need to decide on an investment or a discount request. For SHR's “Emotional Intelligence” programme, this raises a practical question: how can managers prevent the emotion from the first exchange becoming an implicit criterion for the next decision?
1. What the literature establishes
Jennifer S. Lerner and Dacher Keltner (2001, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that fear and anger are associated with different assessments of risk: more pessimistic for fear, more optimistic for anger. Their research combines the study of emotional dispositions with experimental manipulations. Two unpleasant emotions therefore do not necessarily lead to the same judgement.
2. How an emotion carries over into another decision
Jennifer S. Lerner, Deborah A. Small and George Loewenstein (2004, Psychological Science) induced emotions before economic decisions involving objects unrelated to the source of those emotions. Sadness notably increased buying prices while reducing selling prices, compared with a neutral condition. This experiment illustrates a carryover effect: an emotion can change a valuation even when it provides no information about the object being assessed.
3. The hasty conclusion: decide without emotion
It would be excessive to conclude that managers should eliminate all emotion. Concern about an actual failure may draw attention to relevant evidence; concern arising from an earlier exchange does not provide the same information about the current decision. The challenge is to distinguish what arises from the decision itself from what originates elsewhere, without treating that distinction as a guarantee of impartiality. (our executive and employee training programmes)
4. What the evidence does not establish
These studies do not demonstrate that a given emotion consistently produces the same effect in collective, repeated or tightly regulated decisions. Nor do they validate a brief pause as a universal means of removing these influences. The managerial application should therefore be treated as a practice to examine, not as a protocol whose effectiveness has already been established.
5. A practical check in Lucerne
In Lucerne, where tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs include many family-run businesses with short lines of communication and strong regional ties, conversations and decisions can follow one another rapidly. In a hypothetical example, a hotel manager moves from a tense complaint to reviewing a supplier's offer; an exercise for SHR's “Emotional Intelligence” programme would involve recording the decision criteria, the emotion experienced and its presumed source before deciding. Over a predefined period, the manager could track the proportion of decisions documented in this way, then revisit the reasoning once some time has passed since the incident, recording any new information separately. This check makes the practice observable without claiming to prove that decisions have improved or attributing any changes solely to emotion. To go further: explore the Emotional Intelligence training in Lucerne in the canton of Lucerne, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
In pictures: Emotional Intelligence in Lucerne
- emotional intelligence
- Lucerne
- research
- training lucerne