On Creating a Corporate Culture of Fear

Are employees in your organization afraid?

If so, as a leader new research should give you a reason to worry. This month the Journal of Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience published a research article entitled:

"Learning fears by observing others: the neural systems of social fear transmission"

in which the authors discovered "...that fear acquired indirectly through social observation, with no personal experience of the aversive event, engages similar neural mechanisms as fear conditioning."

Which essential means that if your organization supports a culture of fear it will impact the bottom line. For example, if employee "A" has a run-in with an emotionally dysfunctional leader, not only will employee's brain begin to re-wire into a fear response, other employees's brains will also begin to re-wire into a fear response.

Fearful employees are emotional UNintelligent employees. Fearful employees are at higher risk of becoming emotionally disengaged with your organization, which creates a signficant drain on your organization's bottom line.

For those readers who are interested, you can read the full abstract of this important research article here.

BOTTOM LINE: Any Organization with a Culture of Fear is an Unprofitable Organization.