Anxiety and human resource development: Possibilities for cultivating negative capability

• Author: John Blenkinsopp,Amanda Hay
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21332
• Date: 01 June 2019
• Published date: 01 June 2019

QUALITATIVE STUDY

Anxiety and human resource development:

Possibilities for cultivating negative capability

Amanda Hay

1

| John Blenkinsopp

2

1

Nottingham Business School, Nottingham

Trent University, Nottingham, UK

2

Newcastle Business School, Northumbria

University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

Correspondence

Dr Amanda Hay, Nottingham Business School,

Nottingham Trent University, 50 Shakespeare

Street, Nottingham NG1 4FQ, UK.

Email: amanda.hay@ntu.ac.uk

Our article focuses on anxiety, which is an integral but still often

ignored aspect of human resource development (HRD). The con-

text of our study is a particular HRD intervention in Higher Educa-

tion (HE): the part-time MBA, and here for a group of managers

who had taken less-typical routes into HE and for whom anxiety

was often heightened. Drawing on interviews with 20 students, we

offer three contributions. First, we provide in-depth understand-

ings of the manifestations of anxiety in MBA programs highlighting

their location in self-other relations, and so progress understand-

ings of anxiety as a social phenomenon. Second, we provide

insights into how these self-other relations simultaneously play an

integral role in the development of a capacity for “negative capabil-

ity”: that is an ability to recognize the anxiety of not knowing inher-

ent to the learning environment, and with trusted others to contain

it, until it has informed us to allow for the emergence of new

insights and learning. Third, we illustrate the ways in which this

capacity can also be mobilized in students' everyday managerial

work by providing a starting point for public reflection. We suggest

that these contributions offer promise for advancing critical forms

of HRD.

KEYWORDS

anxiety, critical HRD, MBA, negative capability

1|INTRODUCTION

Vince (2002) argues that emotion in organizations is viewed as “uncomfortable knowledge,”which thus gets “avoided

or ignored.”This neglect can also be observed in the human resource development (HRD) context (Bierema & Calla-

han, 2014; Trehan & Rigg, 2011; Vince, 2014, 2016), which is surprising given emotion's integral role in learning

(Elliot, 2008; Fineman, 1997; Gilmore & Anderson, 2012, 2016; Vince, 2010, 2011), and the opportunities this

affords for helping managers better engage with the emotions that pervade their everyday work (Baek & Kim, 2017;

Edmonstone, 2016). Critical HRD scholars who recognize management as a social, political, and economic practice

DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21332

© 2018 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Human Resource Development Quarterly. 2019;30:133–153. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/hrdq 133

and so foreground questions of power, emotion, and political dynamics to analyses of learning and developmenthave

begun to rectify this neglect (Fenwick, 2004, 2005; Grey, Knights, & Willmott, 1996; Hay, 2014; Sambrook, 2008;

Trehan & Rigg, 2011). Our article contributes to this work and focuses on anxiety that has been identifiedas a major

emotional output of attempts to learn and develop (Vince, 2010), perhaps not least as it often emerges when we do

not know—a condition inherent to learning (French & Simpson, 1999). Consistent with Vince (2014), we suggest that

improving how we engage with anxiety in the learning environment is an important first step toward helping people

connect to it.

Our study's context is a particular HRD intervention in Higher Education (HE), the part-time MBA. Our partici-

pants were managers who had taken less-typical routes into HE and for whom anxiety was often heightened. We

suggest analytically this provides opportunities to further develop understandings of anxiety in the HRD context.

Drawing on interviews with 20 students, we build on previous work that has provided personal reflections of anxiety

in management education (Sinclair, 2007; Vince, 2010, 2011); and student reflections on their anxiety in the context

of professional and full time MBA programs (Gilmore & Anderson, 2012, 2016; Griffiths, Winstanley, & Gabriel,

2005; R. Simpson, Sturges, & Weight, 2010), to offer three contributions. First, we provide in-depth understandings

of the manifestations of anxiety in part-time MBA programs as reported by students themselves and highlight its

location in self-other relations. In so doing, we respond to calls for work, which emphasizes “the relational and inter-

subjective dynamics”of anxiety to illustrate how “development is shaped and avoided by ongoing relations between

self and other”(Vince, 2014, p. 411). Second, we provide insights into how these self-other relations simultaneously

play an integral role in encouraging a capacity for “negative capability”—which we conceptualize as an ability to rec-

ognize the anxiety of not knowing inherent to the learning environment, and with trusted others to contain it, until it

has informed us to allow for the emergence of new insights and learning. Third, we also illustrate the ways in which

this capacity might also be mobilized in students’everyday work as managers by providing a starting point for public

reflection. We also, therefore, respond to calls from Saggurthi and Thakur (2016) for research that explores negative

capability in management development. Taken together, we suggest that these insights offer promise for advancing

critical HRD.

Our article is structured as follows. We begin by considering the literature on anxiety as it relates to manage-

ment development. We then consider how anxiety in this context may generate important but so far neglected

opportunities to cultivate “negative capability.”We next outline our study's context: two part-time MBA programs

that typically attract managers who have taken less-typical routes into HE. We describe our interpretivist approach

that utilized in-depth semistructured interviews with 20 MBA students. We then move onto our analysis to illustrate

the specific manifestations of anxiety for this group and in so doing, progress understandings of anxiety as a social

phenomenon. We then consider the ways in which students work with this anxiety with trusted others on the MBA

program to begin to develop a capacity for “negative capability”and then illustrate how this might also be mobilized

in students’everyday work as managers.Finally, we present our discussionand consider the implications foradvancing

critical formsof HRD.

2|ANXIETY AND MANAGEMENT DEVELOPMENT

Our stance on anxiety and its relation to learning and development is informed by a social constructionist philosophy.

Simply put, we suggest that learning “is not something that people possess in their heads, but rather, something that

people do together”(Gergen, 1991, p. 270; see Gherardi, 2006). This reflects an understanding that “we are always a

self-in-relation-to-others, living in, shaping and shaped by a web of relationships (Geertz, 1973) …[since]…we do not

live in isolation….. we create our social and organizational realities with others in our everyday interactions and con-

versations”(see Cunliffe, 2009, p. 95). In this way, emotion becomes an inevitable feature of learning, because it is an

integral aspect of how people create meaning with others (Antonacopoulou & Gabriel, 2001; Voronov, 2014). Anxi-

ety, in particular, is thought to play an especially important role (Fineman, 1997) since as French and Simpson (1999)

134 HAY AND BLENKINSOPP