It is unsettling to realize that we learn and develop most of our social behaviors interacting in competitive environments.
Many people face competition since the first years of life looking for love and attention in the family environment. In other situations, the experience at school stimulates the competitive behaviors because children learn fast what means to be accepted in the winners’ group or be part of the losers.
In adult life, we interact with lots of people in different competitive environments, as for example, the work environment. Independent of the industry or the sector, organizations are built on competitive environments where individuals are accountable by personal goals that usually get priority over collective goals.
On the other hand, the challenges that we are facing in the work environment are getting more complex. They require better team communication, a capacity for continuous learning and smoothly adaptation to the fast changes happening around us.
If we look carefully at the new challenges, we come to the conclusion that a collaborative environment would allow us to tackle the new challenges in a more successful approach.
The question is: how can we change our competitive behaviors nurtured throughout our entire lives and replace them for collaborative behaviors to develop relationships at work based on trust?
This is not a trivial question, and the subject deserves a lot of reflection. In this post, I invite you to think about engagement, an essential element to build and sustain collaborative environments.
Engagement is tri-dimensional and shows physical, emotional, and behavioral dimensions (Wildermuth et al, 2013). In this reflection, I will keep focused on the emotional aspect of engagement.
Emotional engagement is crucial in collaborative environments. When we feel emotionally engaged with a team or work, we are open to empathize with others. In the other’s shoes, we understand the challenges from a bigger perspective.
Thinking about the many aspects that interfere in the levels of emotional engagement, 1 we already know that personality traits, psychological conditions, and work-fit can influence the level of emotional engagement at work. So let´s focus on 3 focal points that are pivotal to the emotional engagement independent of individual differences.
Meaningfulness
When we feel that our contributions are really valuable, we feel connected to the group that we join. We feel that our contributions are unique and relevant to the group accomplishment. It is a fulfilling experience that releases our best performance and creativity.
Unfortunately, meaningfulness is not frequently experienced in competitive environments where few members receive proper recognition that is rapidly forgotten.
In collaborative environments, every single member is valuable because we face the challenges as a team, we will be all winners or all losers. We take risks together, and together we face the consequences of collective decisions.
Stress
For most of us, it is easy to remember cases of burnout affecting people in our inner circles.
2“Mental Health costs are the largest single source of health-related global economic burden, exceeding the respective burdens of cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease, and diabetes.” (Bloom et al., 2011).
Embracing mindfulness we can manage better the level of stress in the environments where we live and work. If we focus on keeping the stressors in healthy levels we will certainly increase our emotional engagement and quality of life.
Development of Natural Talents
It is curious that we expend so much energy trying to be average.
We usually do not invest time and energy to elevate our natural talents because we put a lot of focus to eliminate or improve gaps. So, we waste lots of opportunities to reach excellence in performing and improving activities that look like tailored to us.
Investing in our Strengths, we elevate our emotional engagement, and at the same time, we develop expertise in our natural skills improving the contribution to our teams and communities.
It is important to reflect on the multiple ways to develop our collaborative behaviors. They are the key to our personal and professional growth in a moment where creativity and connection are crucial to allow us to contribute as expected with our teams and community.
1. Cristina de Mello e Souza Wildermuth, EdD, Amy Grace Vaughan, PhD, and Elizabeth Anne Christo-Baker, EdD; A Path to Passion Connecting Personality, Psychological Conditions, and Emotional Engagement; Journal of Psychological Issues in Organizational Culture, Volume 3, Number 4, 2013 © 2013 Bridgepoint Education, Inc. and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/jpoc.21082
2. David D. Luxton; Artificial Intelligence in BEHAVIORAL AND MENTAL HEALTH CARE; 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.; ISBN: 978-0-12-420248-1; Chapter 1, pg. 17
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