"From this worldview emerged the conclusion that the most effective leaders should rely on intellect alone and suppress their own emotions. In turn, organizations prioritized analytical brilliance and sought to engineer employee performance through incentives, metrics, and systems, while readily dismissing any notion that people's emotional experience could elevate their judgment, motivation, creativity, or performance. For as long as people have worked in offices, emotions have been treated as an unwelcome friction that directly undermines productivity."
"Once leadership fully embraced the premise that humans are primarily rational beings, a clear set of practices emerged-shaping work for as long as most of us have been alive. Leaders were directed to make decisions based on data and analysis alone, to prioritize efficiency and standardization, to enforce hierarchical structure, and to focus on output over understanding their employees' emotional experience. Managerial feedback and coaching emphasized correction and compliance (fault-finding) over learning and understanding (growth and development)."
For over a century workplace leadership rested on the belief that humans are fundamentally rational, rooted in Descartes' privileging of reason over feeling. Leaders concluded that intellect alone should guide decisions and that emotions must be suppressed. Organizations prioritized analytical brilliance, designing incentives, metrics, and systems to engineer performance, while dismissing emotional experience as irrelevant. Standard leadership practices emphasized data-driven decision-making, efficiency, hierarchy, and output over understanding employee emotions, with feedback focused on correction and compliance. That control-oriented approach proved misaligned with human nature as decisions failed in practice and compliance did not yield discretionary effort.
Read at Psychology Today
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