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the beetle song says love is all you need but a new study by Wharton's Nancy
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rothbard finds that maybe love isn't all you need in the workplace Nancy thanks
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for being with us today thanks Rachel now your study focused on an interesting environment in it was firehouses and
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firemen could you talk to us a little bit about how you picked what why firemen and what you were looking at
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what you were trying to find sure so uh this is a study that's co-authored with
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Mandy O'Neal who's at George Mason University and what Mandy and I did was
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we really wanted to go in and understand how the culture the emotional culture of
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an organization could affect how people both interact in the in the workplace but also what the effects of them on
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them physiologically might be and so we were really interested in looking at emotional culture and in particular
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culture of Love which you've already talked about as well as another particular ular type of culture that
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often emerges in organizations especially masculine organizations which is called culture of joviality and
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culture of joviality is sort of the fun the joking the pranks kind of a macho you know backs slapping uh teasing type
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of a culture uh culture of companionate Love is really one where there's a sense
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of compassion caring affection for one another and what was really interesting about looking at this question in the
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context of firefighters is that this is a really ex extreme setting to think about the question of love you know a
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lot of uh the P there there's a little bit of past research that's looked at
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culture of companion at love and that's looked at mostly healthc care settings
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and and other kinds of uh organizational settings where it might be more expected
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whereas we we really wanted to look at an extreme case to see does love matter and is love evident in these masculine
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organizations and now what you found was is that love does matter but some other
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things matter too so tell us a little bit about some of the work that you did which was very I mean involved a lot of
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actually going into firehouses talking to these people and tell us a little bit about what you found sure so this study
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um this actually paper comprises two studies the first study was a qualitative study where we did
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interviews with a bunch of firefighters at uh 27 different uh groups of firefighters uh 27 different uh shifts
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and stations and so what we looked at with those groups uh is we just sort of went in and we wanted to know really the
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questions about culture but also what made their jobs tough or what were what was the what were the challenges that
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they were facing in their jobs and there were a couple of really interesting things that emerged from that stage of
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the research one is that when we ask people what's the toughest thing about your
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job the answer they gave us was actually really surprising so this is these are groups of about 97% men we we actually
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interviewed a 100 men in this first study or 100 people in this first study and 97 of them were men there were three
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women in the entire group and that's very uh prototypical and and and uh expected in in this firefighting
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occupations and so what what we found was we said what's the mo what's the most
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challenging thing about your job over half of them said work family conflict which was a huge surprise to us we were
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not expecting that to be you know the the answer it makes a lot of sense in retrospect because a lot of the the the
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way they work they're they're on these shifts and these these overnight shifts
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and they they're they their jobs are really affected by the type of shift work that they do um and the type of
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work that they do is often very emotionally stressful uh firefighters interestingly um firefighters are not uh
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most of their job is not fighting fires most of it is emergency response anytime
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911 is called the there are firefighters who have to respond and so they actually
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are at the scenes of all sorts of emergency calls and situations some of them more stressful than others uh and
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some of them quite quite stressful um uh indeed and so what we found when we we were talking to them was that you know
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some of the stresses that they experienced on the job they they really were concerned about those spilling over
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to the home so one story that we that we that really sticks in my mind from from
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this first study was of one of the firefighters who described how he really wanted to really keep the the workplace
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separate from his home life and so he actually kept a pair of flip-flops in the station where and he would wear
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those back and forth between his home and work because he didn't want his boots from that he wore on on scene to
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to even enter his house because he really felt like he didn't want it to contaminate the work to contaminate his
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home and so he was really had a very extreme example of trying to keep these two apart um you know a lot of the other
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things that we that we talked about with the firefight also had to do with the culture that they you know of of of
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their of their station and of the firehouse and so one of the themes that emerged was this culture of joviality
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which we expected the you know the pranks the humor all of the kind of fun things that they do to keep themselves
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occupied and to relieve the stress um but the second emotional theme that emerged around culture was this
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theme of companionate love and another way to think about companionate love is brotherly love right so it's it's not
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romantic love it's it's the kind of you know compassion you know giving each
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other a hug if you know something something tough has has come up um making sure that you're there for each
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other that you know each other deeply uh and that you show that you care about one another and sometimes that can be in
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like small acts like washing the dishes or making sure that you have somebody's
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favorite snack uh you know that that you're that you're making in in the
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kitchen and and so there's a lot of there's a lot of camaraderie and brotherly love that we also saw at some
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of these fire stations um and what's really interesting about this this study
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to me is we we looked at firefighters as an extreme case of masculine organizations but this really can apply
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to lots of different organizations it can apply to all sorts of settings where the Norms are really masculine uh in
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terms of the dominant expected Behavior we we see all sorts of examples of you know that kind of camaraderie the the
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Frat House culture you know on Wall Street you know just as we do on you know in the firehouse or in you know
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police stations or in Army kinds of settings where which might be a little bit easier to see the connection with
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firefighters but we see we see these same types of behaviors in lots of different occupational settings now the
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first part of the study focused on these interviews so tell us a little more about the second part of the study and
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where you where you went from there sure so in the first part part of the study as you said we did these interviews we
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we we had a couple of surprises that that arose along the way um one of the other pieces that uh we saw there was
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that one of the ways that firefighters talked about coping with some of these stresses was through suppression through
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kind of bottling it up and keeping it all in or separating it as I talked about before
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but what the literature says about suppression is that that's actually often a very bad thing sure uh and and
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that can lead to all sorts of negative Health outcomes and other problematic um outcomes on things like
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risk-taking uh you know and and and the like and so what what we found was that when so so so we we we basically figured
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that what we wanted to do is think about okay how do all these things go together
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and so we did a second study where we surveyed a lot more folks so we had 27 uh groups uh in in the first study in
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the second study we had 68 uh fire uh you know fire stations and what we did was and about 600 people that we that we
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surveyed um and so you know a lot of folks that we surveyed we also then surveyed their supervisors so the the
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battalion chief the person who was in charge of the fire stations what we asked the battalion chief was What's the
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culture of the station right do you see it being characterized by joviality by these jokes these pranks the teasing the
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amusement do you see it being characterized by compassion by tenderness by by love and so what we
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what we found is and and you know they could have answered both and in indeed in our in our um in our interviews we
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found there were some stations that were characterized by both there were some stations that were characterized by
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either just joviality alone and there were others that were characterized by just love alone and some that you know
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exhibited neither of those characteristics so we did a survey of you know and and we we had about 600
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respondents uh that we surveyed and we got about 324 uh participants who responded to the
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survey and what what happened was that that when people said that they felt like they experienced a lot of work
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family conflict and they were also suppressing that conflict it turns out that was kind of a bad thing as the
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literature would suggest and in fact we found that those folks engaged in more risk taking off the job so they reported
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you know you know uh more alcohol use things like uh doing high-risk types of occupations
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um or high-risk types of hobbies uh Etc and but when people were in cultures that were the Battalion Chiefs had rated
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as being high in both joviality and companion at love that risk-taking was reduced and so there was
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something about being in a culture where you were able to both joke around but also get the um you know the feelings of
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compassion and caring of Brotherly Love from your fellow firefighters that really tempered each other and allow
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people to I think probably vent a little bit in the workplace so they didn't have
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to let off that steam off of work so they it was making it easier for them not to take work home with them exactly
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so this study looks a lot at these looks very closely at these organizational cultures at warehouses how can someone
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apply this at their office I mean I would think that sometimes it's very hard to know what your organizational
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culture is because you have to be you have to be pretty honest with yourself sometimes especially if you're the
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manager and you might be the one who's modeling this so how can someone take
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this research and maybe diagnose the culture and their organization and even try to improve it to apply some of what
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you found so actually there it it it's fairly straightforward to diagnose your
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culture first first of all you have to though be willing to look and be open to what you find so first when you think
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about emotional culture there's there's signs all around us there's artifacts
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there's there's statements there's stories that people use that you can you
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that you can use to really diagnose that and understand it with culture of joviality the thing that you want to
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look for as a manager is is it going too far are the is the teasing and the pranks you know it may be very fun high
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energy high octane but is that going too far and that's the thing you worry about
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with a culture of joviality right is it is it is it crossing the line to bullying or harassment and that's what
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you don't want as a manager with culture of companion at Love Actually what you want to look for
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are things like are people caring about each other are they are they checking in
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when somebody's sick are they you know making sure that they know how things
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are going with a particular individual and so as a manager you can model that behavior if your employees out sick for
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a couple days you can send them a note or give them a phone call and say hey just thinking of you how you doing is
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there anything I can do to help you know those kinds of things really help to model a culture of love where people
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feel like others are looking out for them that they care about them and that that they matter in that organization
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and so you know I think it's actually it it it's not as hard as it might seem to
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model those things and to and to check to see whether you have a culture of joviality in addition to a culture of
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love you just have to be be willing to stand back and kind of take a closer look at it yes you need to take a look
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and see now this study seems to debunk a little bit some of the stereotypes that
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we may have about male-dominated workplaces in that you did find a culture of lots of companionate love or
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Brotherhood that was going on and I think sometimes we may stereotype that male dominated
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workplaces are not like that that it's something that you would find more with
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female dominated workplaces do you feel like the study kind of puts that on its ear a little bit or absolutely one of
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the things that we found that was really fascinating in this setting is that when
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we looked at culture of love you know this was not something that we had necessarily gone in expecting to see
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culture of joviality yes but culture of love no and what was fascinating about it to us is that it really did appear
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very strongly in this setting and when we think about masculine organizations a lot of times we think these are
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organizations where it's not okay to express any emotion much less love and yet we saw all sorts of emotional
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expression going on including love and how do you plan on following up this research well uh my my co-author Mandy
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has a study where she's looking at culture of uh different emotional cultures in a hospital setting and and I
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think it's going to be really fascinating for me one of the things that was really interesting about this
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is this piece where work family conflict just sort of seem to emerge almost out of nowhere in these ma masculine
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organizations and that's something that really hasn't been looked at in the
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literature as much we when we talk about work family conflict we tend to think about that also being very much uh in in
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we think about women experiencing work family conflict but but focusing on men and the fact that men experience work
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family conflict too just as powerfully is a really important finding that we saw here that I really want to explore
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further in future research Nancy thanks for being with us today thanks Rachel [Music]