Emotional barriers block effective communication
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There are lies we tell ourselves, fictions we inhabit — that reason and rage are at a remove from one another. That objectivity and optimism are obscured from association. That persuasion and pride run parallel and not perpendicular. These lies, these fictions, they aren’t malicious or malevolent, but rather mundane. Because our perception has always been padded by our personality.
Our experience has always been enabled by our emotions. It's easy to acknowledge this truth when thinking about our personal lives. It's hard to have the glass shatter when our friends find faults with our new flame, but we literally know it is going to happen at some point. It’s harder, however, to accept this truth in our professional lives. We imagine we quite well sever our emotions from our employment. But your Sunday blues affect your Monday moves. The term emotional barrier signifies not being able or willing to address the emotional impact of your lived experiences on your communication with others. Understanding and addressing emotional barriers in workplace communication is an important power skill you will need to learn to master to achieve your career goals.
What are emotional barriers?
Most workplaces are filled with people from different walks of life whose unique lived experiences inform who they are and how they present themselves to their colleagues. Even in a small, family-run business, Grandpa approaches problems and opportunities differently than his septum-pierced grandchild. A person’s lived experience is accompanied by their emotional state. An emotional state is the feelings and moods experienced by an individual, which can be influenced by events, personal characteristics or the environment. Emotional states are internal within the individual experiencing them. Emotional barriers are a negative consequence of when those emotional states color how an individual communicates with others, often externalizing that emotional state to the detriment of the back and forth of effective communication.
Brandi Gratis at software development firm nulab enlightens us with knowledge about emotional barriers impact in the workplace in her 2025 article “Overcoming Emotional Barriers to Communication.” In the article, Gratis describes an emotional barrier as a “mental block that influences how you perceive others’ actions and prevents you from clearly communicating your feelings, which can often trigger an emotional response that’s inappropriate or unproductive.”
On a day where you found $20 in your freshly washed slacks, Sally’s joke about your missing TPS report may lead to a round of chuckles between the two of you along with an offer from you to buy her out a coffee with the found treasure. On a day where your awesome red Swingline stapler is stolen from your cubicle, the same joke may elicit you to lash out at Sally and curtly remind her that you don’t need to take this kind of grief from someone who regularly microwaves fish in the staff breakroom (in this instance, you are in the right, as there is a special area in the bad place for those who microwave fish at work.)
Examples of emotional barriers one can manifest at work are:
- Anger
- Pride
- Anxiety
- Apathy
Each of these emotional barriers has a direct impact on your ability to accurately consume information coming from the person who unknowingly may have awakened negative feelings within you. Anger activates the amygdala, putting you in fight, flight or freeze mode. This shuts down the analytical parts of your brain. Pride impacts your ability to actively listen, making it difficult to hear ideas that are different from your own. Anxiety makes it difficult to concentrate, another impact on active listening and analytical reasoning. Apathy often reads to other people as negativity or disinterest, making them less likely to want to communicate with you.
Everyone has emotions, and their shelf life within a professional setting can vary. Sigal Barsade, a professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and co-author of the seminal paper on this subject “Why Does Affect Matter in Organizations?”, breaks down three different types of emotion one can display or interact with in a work setting.
- Discrete. Short-lived emotions that subside relatively soon, like joy, anger, fear or disgust.
- Moods. Longer lasting feelings that may not necessarily be tied to a specific situation. Someone could be in a cheerful mood one day, a down mood the next.
- Personality traits.: An emotional state of being that defines a person’s overall approach to life. Winnie the Pooh’s Eeyore and Tigger are two examples of the extreme ends of the personality trait spectrum.
Again, it is incredibly human to bring discrete emotions, moods and personality traits into the work environment. What is important is to be able to bring self-awareness to your own emotional states when communicating with others to ensure you are balancing your own emotional state on how you respond to communication from a colleague.
What is perception bias?
Gratis explores another facet of emotional barriers in her article:perception bias. A perception bias is a type of cognitive bias that happens when our personal experiences, beliefs and expectations distort how we interpret reality, leading to subjective and often inaccurate judgments about people, situations or information. Sometimes perception biases are positive. My mom is an incredible baker and always brings over treats when she comes to visit, making me more likely to react to her kindly as she shares family gossip while I stuff my face with the delicious cookies I’ve grown up eating. In a work setting, a perception bias might manifest itself as a positive response to a product idea (no matter how impractical) from a sales manager who is outperforming expectations, or it might manifest itself as a negative response when the person who stole your favorite parking spot in the staff garage offers a helpful suggestion in a meeting later that day which you curtly dismiss as unworkable.
Perception biases also manifest themselves in one’s preconceived notions based on personality or demographic markers. How often does an extrovert at your organization dismiss not getting the introvert on the team involved in the discussion because “if they had something to say, they’d speak up.” The cultural concepts around, “OK, Boomer,” and Millennial's avocado toast as being the reason why they can’t buy a house are perception biases built around age. Growing up or living in a different socioeconomic environment from the people on a team or within an organization often leads to perception biases on both sides.
Perception biases can manifest in many ways in the workplace with a myriad of negative results. Older, more established workers may dismiss ideas from newer, younger workers just because of their age, disincentivizing younger workers to feel like they are valued within an organization and driving them to seek employment elsewhere. Invitations to weekend golf games may not be extended to an employee the inviter perceives as not growing up in a socioeconomic environment where playing golf is more common, leading to the person who wasn’t invited losing out on out-of-office face time with those participating in the game.
Perception bias, while potentially engendering negative consequences, doesn’t often come from a place of ill intent. It is difficult for each of us to self-identify our own perception biases. Humans are pattern-seeking mammals, and often perception bias is born from mapping aperception pattern onto a situation without assessing to see if those patterns actually fit the situation. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they don’t.
What are the impacts of emotional barriers and perception bias on workplace communication?
When it comes to emotions, it is often easiest to connect with our own experiences, and somewhat more difficult to connect with the experiences of others. When examining emotional barriers and perception bias within workplace communication, it is easy to imagine how they would impact us and a little harder to imagine how they can impact the wider organization.
Gratis shares some examples of the institutional impacts that emotional barriers and perception biases bring to the workplace. These impacts include:
- Distorts interpretations. Constructive feedback may be perceived as criticisms and questions perceived as challenges. This in turn…
- Inhibits open dialogue. If an employee consistently perceives questions as challenges, other employees will avoid asking them questions, leading to projects moving forward uncritically or with missing information. This in turn …
- Increases stress. Ongoing difficulty interacting with team members who are unaware of their emotional barriers or perception biases consumes a lot of emotional and mental bandwidth within an organization. Time that could be spent working on tasks is spent unwinding miscommunications or venting with others about the situation. This can cause burnout and decreased engagement. This in turn …
- Affects performance. When collaboration suffers, a team cannot perform to their highest potential. People will only put up with emotionally unstable work environments for so long before they seek employment elsewhere, leading to higher levels of turnover.
Healthy organizations have policies, procedures and best practices that help to mitigate the ill-effects of emotional barriers and perception biases within their teams. These include effective feedback mechanisms, both anonymous or otherwise, 360-review processes and a culture of responding to, rather than ignoring, problems. Unhealthy organizations would rather ignore the negative impacts of emotional barriers and perception biases, blaming low performance and high turnover on external factors rather than those within their control.
Look around your own organization. Does it have effective policies, procedures and practices in place that make all employees feel both heard and seen? Do they sweep problems under the rug and pretend like they don’t exist? Do negative emotions spread like a virus unchecked or are they neutralized by a healthy emotional immune system within the organization?
How do I decrease the impact of emotional barriers at my organization?
We all have agency to improve the emotional landscape of the organization at which we work. Modeling the behavior we seek from others goes a long way toward that healthy organizational immune system response to negative, disincentivizing emotions. Barsade offers a number of suggestions in her 2021 article “Leadership Influence Controlling Emotional Contagions.” To quote from her article, she suggests to:
- Be consciously aware of your own mood. If it's not one that will be useful to your team, change it. To get in a more positive mood, take one minute and imagine a past situation in which you felt really positive or a future situation that would make you very happy.
- Use nonverbal behaviors to communicate emotional contagion. As most emotional communication occurs through body language, facial expression and tone (with less than 10% communicated through words), pay attention to your body language as you communicate your emotions, whether in person or virtually.
- Make direct eye contact with everyone on the team. Focus on spreading your positive emotional contagion to others on your team. Team members are most likely to catch your emotions when they look at you directly. You can help them do so by initiating eye contact. When managing a remote workforce, schedule quick, frequent video check-ins to accomplish this step.
- Neutralize a negative team member. Being aware that emotional contagion exists can help inoculate you against a negative team member. Talking to a negative person can help; people often don't realize how negatively they are being perceived, or how their negative emotions are influencing the team. When team members are being intentionally negative, determining and discussing the source of the negativity can be helpful.
- Create a positive emotional culture within the team. Emotional culture consists of the symbols, norms, values and basic assumptions team members have about emotions that are acceptable to express and those that need to be suppressed in the team.
For at least the next six to 12 months, we are not robots. It is natural and healthy to have emotions and express them. It is healthy and natural to perceive patterns and use those patterns to help navigate a quickly shifting environment. But it is important to ensure that those emotions and perceptions don’t negatively impact how we interact with others in our personal and professional lives. Socrates reminds us that, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Examine the impact your emotional state has on those you are communicating with. You may be surprised by what you uncover.
Adam Bazer, MPD, senior director of thought product development, ASHE.