PRINCIPALES MANIFESTACIONES DEL ABUSO PROCESAL

intelligence in 2004.

It is perhaps no surprise that emotional intelligence has entered the lexicon of competencies within the context of local government. Local authorities have been keen on performance management and competency measurement since the 1990s. They have embraced emotional intelligence by setting up short training courses to gain that competence and score it according to various models and balanced scorecards. The UK government and agencies recognised the potential role of emotional

intelligence in human resource capacity building but the directives and ideas were formulaic, couched in hierarchical and interventionist paradigms. The topics of concern were “risk taking” and “e-government”, and as such were seen as masculine style problems requiring technical skill solutions. There were problems in this in that emotional intelligence in this context began to only have a voice in top management and competencies development, with it being deemed that leadership alone needed the self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and social management tenets. At this time a comprehensive performance assessment regime with hundreds of performance indicators comprised the government-imposed system for assessing how services were performing. However, there arose a confusing plethora of models and directives that reinforced the non-participatory tradition of performance management. By this I mean both that workers’ views about why the results were better or worse than planned were absent, and that there was a lack of meaningful customer (tax- payer) feedback. The finance and budget-led models of organisational development smacked of central political control to me and missed the real value of nurturing and supporting people as human beings – not units of human resource expenditure. After all it is human beings that build the public-service relationship with customers – whether librarians or planning officers. I took the perspective that the literature and research centres were caught up in the government’s desire to gain control over local government outcomes. There was funding for research and quangos emerging ripe with researchers sponsored and seconded to produce reports and find interventions that made links between central and local government. To some extent my views were at odds with this movement.

Alongside this impersonal and performative control regime there was a corporate enthusiasm for “emotional intelligence” in my workplace. Emotional intelligence gained global popular appeal via the work of Goleman (1995a) and had found its way into my vocabulary, and was being taught in training courses in my organisation. When I saw “emotional intelligence” being promoted in a generalised way as an organisational competency for senior managers I was disturbed that it was not reaching the majority of workers at lower levels of seniority in the organisation. I believed this constituted control of the concept of emotion based on a fear of the unknown or unaccountable phenomenon of emotion. It was at this stage that I began to first recognise that emotion at work was a power source, often pathological but also

possibly enriching and supportive of beneficial movements in work but also in the self. I will return to the way emotional intelligence is measured in a critique in Chapter 4. I saw that there was no method or framework with which to promote this new work. Before I more fully embarked on the action research I interviewed the lead director for the EFQM at the government’s “Improvement and Development Agency” (IDeA) – an organisation assisting local government. There was an interest but I found a pervading sense of the need to control and account for people through measureable competency scores and frameworks within a simple structure. This did not match the rhetoric of “professional artistry”. So I resolved that I needed to find out for myself – somehow engaging emotionally in the observation and participation of emotion in our work in an effort to contribute an alternative view of emotions at work. How and in what way I could do this was a question the answer to which I felt would emerge through reflective practice, reading and writing.

There appeared to be a paradox to me. On the one hand the government was keen to embrace (and keen to be seen to embrace) emotional intelligence as a people-centred, “investors in people” type approach but, on the other hand, deployment and regard for emotion was being accounted for in a human resource framework. This was a way of collecting and commodifying emotions as part of the objective and measureable intelligence of the organisation. The term local “government” or local “authority” implies a need to control and so emotion may, to many in authority, be seen as counter to the purpose of the organisation.

The preliminary stages in setting up my research as outlined in the foregoing may seem a long and involved process but such is the task of embracing research into emotions at work in organisations. It is difficult in such a wide and complex discourse to delimit a

boundary for the study but the preparatory stages enabled me to simplify my approach and focus in on the unique opportunity of my action research position in a real work context.