Supporting change: can we predict how long its emotional impact will last?
Before changing how work is organised, a manager must prepare support without assuming how each person will adapt. The useful question is specific: how much confidence should we place in predictions about the duration of the emotional discomfort caused by that change?
What the literature establishes
Daniel T. Gilbert, Elizabeth C. Pinel, Timothy D. Wilson, Stephen J. Blumberg and Thalia P. Wheatley (1998, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) identify a tendency, in the situations studied, to overestimate how long negative emotional reactions will last. Their explanation focuses in particular on the underestimation of psychological processes that help people make sense of an event and soften its impact. A sincere prediction of lasting distress is therefore not necessarily an accurate one.
The mechanism: one event fills the horizon
Timothy D. Wilson, Thalia Wheatley, Jonathan M. Meyers, Daniel T. Gilbert and Danny Axsom (2000, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) examine the role of “focalism” in this overestimation. When people imagine their future through the lens of one event, they may underestimate the place that other activities and experiences will occupy. In their experiments, directing attention towards those other elements reduces the durability bias under investigation.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that employees will eventually get used to the change and that limited support is sufficient. These studies justify neither that confidence nor the dismissal of expressed concerns: they address forecasting errors, not the harmlessness of organisational changes. Persistent overload or a genuine loss of autonomy cannot be reduced to a poorly calibrated emotional forecast. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence does not allow us to promise
These articles do not directly test managers' ability to predict their teams' emotions during a reorganisation. Nor do they establish that an emotional intelligence programme improves such accuracy. For SHR's “Emotional Intelligence” programme, their value lies in providing a focus for practice: distinguishing attention to a present emotion from a hypothesis about its future course.
A practical check in Lugano
In Lugano, a bank, a fashion or trading company, or an Italian-speaking family SME could test this distinction during a limited procedural change with no implications for employment. Before implementation, volunteers would record, in Italian if preferred, their anticipated discomfort for each of the following four weeks on a scale from 0 to 10, then record their actual discomfort at the end of each week. The measure would be the mean absolute difference between forecast and experience, calculated from matched responses and reported only in an aggregated form that protects anonymity. This check would help adjust the timing of follow-up conversations, not assess individuals or imply that persistent discomfort is unjustified. To go further: explore the Emotional Intelligence training in Lugano, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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