“Thank you, Dad” - Sumanjit was reading the what’s app message he had received from his son. His reply was “shyam, kindly check the shoes once you receive them and let me if the size is ok. It must be. I had checked the size before I placed the online order with the company”. He had sent the message sitting in his room in the first floor to his son who was in the ground floor.
“Hi, nice to meet you, I am Jose, working for a company called autocrine.” said the young man to the acquaintance he met in the mall. “Aurocrine? Wow, nice to hear, I am also from the same company. I think we have had a number of chats as I deal with your bills. I work with the finance department. XAVIER.”, “Xavier? Well, we had a number of chats on line for over an year.. The only thing is we haven’t met each other.”
Do you think the above conversations look crazy? But that is the reality of today…
We are living in a world haunted by ‘connectivism’. But this term appears to define more ‘the instruments and processes’ that connect us rather than ‘emotional and personal’ interactions that would define a connected relationship. Though proximate by the power of technology, we stand disconnected even in proximate distances. While the speed, power and ease of communication has increased, our objectives of communication have become more formal, result-oriented and dominant to meet our personal goals, achievements, brands and revenues. Social media seem to be rewiring our brain systems triggering greater anxiety, instant gratification needs, speedy out-reach and extensive visibility, oftentimes for undefined goals and purposes. Social construction of knowledge is encouraging participatory and multi-dimensional perceptions to knowledge constructs and their application, both empowering and disrupting their legacy.
The Disruptors
The disappearance of classical joint family systems and the urge for attainment of personal goals by each member of a family or a community, has redefined social constructs and relationships, changing the magnitude and directions of the elements that contribute to the development of social intelligence. In a professional world, the organized structure of an office or a work-station is giving way to ‘work from home’ culture and ‘building online relationships” for short-term objectives and realization of goals of immediacy. Hence the bonding in such relationships are becoming fragile, with bonding lacking empathy and human considerations. The efforts to scaffold such relationships in organizational processes are not given serious attention keeping in view the changing work styles. Thus, the challenges to effective development of social intelligence appears to be increasing; or possibly calling for renewed interpretations and tools to measure social intelligence. Declining sensitivity to human relationships even in non-organized structures is causing stress and mistrust in social relationships leading to seclusion, and isolation. Consumer behaviours and marketing methods are focused towards creating needs for products by creating competitive social equities by creating “brand ego” in consumption behaviour and through sale reach-outs by discount processes which lure consumers though the truth behind such designs are indeed questionable.
The Impact
These lead to marginalizing many of the finer aspects of human relationships or factors that would contribute to the social wealth, as profits count more than the people. There is evidence of not only ‘divided societies’ but ‘divided individuals’ in the emerging scenario. Finding time for social interactions is decreasing with greater thrust on formal interactions rather than informal interactions. This, psychologists claim, has a direct impact on their biological systems, the flow of hormones and action-reaction patterns. This could also deprive them for possible inputs for leadership behaviours in social contexts. Consequently, these social disruptions seem to impact the legacy of ‘culture’ – which again is seeking to find a new meaning in their existing eco-systems. All these and more seem to drag the social engineering to newer vistas of structural and organizational analysis.
Role of social intelligence
Social intelligence is considered as the driving force for powerful inter-personal relations, interactive human behaviours, empathy and a cohesive strategy for holistic human development. Based on the experiments of neuro-sciences, Daniel Goleman, the noted advocate of Emotional intelligences finds the following as the basic elements of social intelligence – empathy, empathic accuracy, social cognition and attunement. Further his experiments do indicate the strong relationship between the social intelligence and the personal health, emotional behaviour, moods and immune systems. Social intelligence is also considered as a reflection of the quality of life of the individual against several quantified projections of the existential dynamics. Measurements of Social intelligence Quotient (SQ)have also been put in place and they seem to resonate with some of the obvious findings in social behaviour. People with low SQ are found to be poor in customer relationships and are tuned more to work in a constrained environment and small groups with low reach-out to markets. Those who seem to score high on SQ have been found to provide the opposite results. These observations indeed do raise the question whether there will a marked change in the net SQ of the professionals working in an online world. Indeed, it is a valid point for research.
The Behaviour of the ’online’ world
In the ‘online’ world of most professions, both in the present and the future, the possibilities of personal interactions are slowly and systemically replaced by ‘online’ communications which do convey the message in an effective and professional manner, but lacks the emotional content that was the essence of personal communications. Though a number of visual interventions are available for delivering differentiated personal contact models, the effective human interactions become religiously formal leaving several elements of social constructs missing. The social behaviour of most ‘online’ communities is thus becoming a matter of deep social analytics.
The social intelligence test models from the George Washington University appears to have the following basic elements:
Observation of human behavior
Recognition of the mental state of the speaker
Memory for names & faces
Judgement in social situations
Sense of humour
If one could evaluate the human resources working in a personalized system and in an ‘online’ system, one could easily predict several differences in the behavioural pattern and outcomes. While one might argue that in all evolving social systems, such changes are bound to occur, it is equally important to position the dynamics appropriately so that the essence and finesse of human relationships articulated through their social intelligence is not lost track of.
Neuro-cognitive considerations
Neuro-cognitive psychologists have found the significant role of ‘Mirror Neurons’ in the brain to facilitate social interaction, social cohesion and the resultant social behaviour. Their role right from the birth has been studied and evidences do show their contribution to building strong emotional bonding between members of the family and the community. They facilitate collective learning and cooperative learning in all shades of work. But they come into play largely in personal interactions and may seek further studies or research when considered for their role in “online” community behaviour.
The Paradox
“Emotional dissociation” in an increasingly connected world is indeed a paradox. It could slowly shift towards “emotional blandness” and “emotional inadequacy”. Be it in a home environment or a professional environment, this would lead to a “Me” dominant world. There could be several arguments to justify the changes too, as a part of social re-engineering in an aspiring world. The implications of these on future social life systems and in the process of co-habitation do call for intensive research by sociologists and psychologists.
The Need
The HR systems in organizations need to sensitize themselves to the changing ‘performance’ behaviour and ‘emotional’ behaviour of their employees, their ‘relationship models’ with customers, as formal and customised communication reach will dominate over personal reach. Would it indeed mean that the way we do business, the way we drive our organizational structures call for some fresh rethinking to find more synergy with the changes? Results, Brands and Markets are likely to fluctuate fast in such socially unstable models of human interactions. I am sure social psychologists will have a busy schedule ahead engaging with the changing professional worlds.
While, I am no pessimist, I see the writing on the wall.
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