ABSTRACT
This chapter conceptualizes the organization as an emotionally eliciting mental object and defines some boundary conditions or dimensions that between them generate and shape the patterning of experience. In the process, it reformulates the idea of "emotional intelligence" as a source of information into the nature and functioning of the organization, seen under these conditions. The chapter suggests how an emotional constellation presented in the context of organizational work, which may seem to indicate individual pathology, can simultaneously be understood as a signal of and a disguised response to emotional challenges that are part and parcel of effective organizational functioning. The idea that emotional experience in organizations may reflect and be a function of an organization's structure and process is not new. Emotional experience will then be seen not as a source of intelligence, but as a disturbing or frustrating sideeffect, to be attributed to individual or group pathology, to the particular characteristics of staff or vagaries of interpersonal relations.
