Emotional Intelligence training in LucerneEmotional intelligence in the canton of Lucerne: can worry unrelated to a decision alter risk assessment?

In the canton of Lucerne, tourism, hospitality, regional financial services and industrial SMEs include many family-run businesses with short decision-making channels. When a manager considers a financial commitment after a difficult exchange, how can they prevent their current emotion from standing in for risk analysis?

What the literature establishes: negative emotions are not interchangeable

Jennifer S. Lerner and Dacher Keltner (2001, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that fear and anger can steer risk judgments in different directions. In their research, fear is associated with more pessimistic assessments and greater risk aversion, whereas anger accompanies more optimistic assessments and a greater willingness to take risks. An emotion's unpleasantness is therefore not enough to predict its effect on a decision.

A mechanism: treating feelings as information about the decision

Norbert Schwarz and Gerald L. Clore (1983, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show that mood can contribute to judgments of life satisfaction. In one of their experiments, drawing attention to the weather as a possible source of mood changes this influence. This finding supports an attribution mechanism: a feeling may serve as information about what is being evaluated even though it comes from another source.

The hasty conclusion: decisions should be emotion-free

These findings do not mean that worry is necessarily misleading or that a confident decision is necessarily unfounded. An emotion may also signal a genuine problem, such as an inconsistency in a contractual commitment. For SHR's Emotional Intelligence programme, the relevant learning objective is to distinguish a signal worth examining from the evidence on which to base a decision. (our executive and employee training programmes)

The limits: findings that do not validate a decision-making method

These studies concern neither Lucerne businesses nor the effectiveness of emotional intelligence training. A life-satisfaction judgment and an experimental risk assessment do not reproduce a collective investment decision. Asking about the possible source of an emotion is therefore a precaution to test, not a guarantee of neutrality or better performance.

A practical check in Lucerne

Consider a hypothetical example: at a family-run hotel in Lucerne, a manager must decide on an equipment purchase after handling a difficult complaint, with direct access to the owner-management. For one month, before deciding on any purchase above the internal approval threshold, she records the emotion she feels, its possible source, the documented risks and one piece of information that could change her view. The check tracks the proportion of cases containing all four elements and identifies justifications based solely on feelings; also applicable to a tourism provider, a regional financial service or an industrial SME, this record verifies the practice without itself demonstrating better decisions. 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.

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