14 DAY TRIAL // A new Dutch study concluded that an angry boss can sometimes stimulate employees into being more creative, as some people have better performances once they receive an angry feedback or assignment.
Nevertheless, directed at the wrong person, the anger will be taken as an aggression and the person's creativity could be blocked.
The difference is made by the degree of engagement and desire to understand a situation – called epistemic motivation.
This trait is linked to the worker's personality and the environment at the workplace, so to measure it, study researcher Gerben van Kleef, a social psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, and his team, asked 63 undergraduate psychology students to rate the degree of their agreement with certain statements such as, “It upsets me to go into a situation without knowing what I can expect from it.”
The students then had 8 minutes to come up with as many ideas as possible about the use of a potato, before listening to what they thought was live feedback from an evaluator discussing brainstorming.
The “evaluator” was actually an actor reading from a script, and in one version of the video he sounded neutral, while in another he frowned and made angry gestures.
Next task given to the students was to generate as many ideas as possible about the use of a brick, and stop once they ran out of ideas.
The results showed that the students with low epistemic motivation, every area was affected by the difference in feedback, except for the range of ideas they came up with.
Van Kleef and his team concluded that subjects with high degrees of epistemic motivation came out with more original ideas and became more engaged after receiving angry feedback, than after receiving neutral feedback, unlike those with low epistemic motivation that had the opposite response.
People with a high degree of epistemic motivation will interpret anger not as an aggression but rather as as reflection of a below-par performance that needs improvement, van Kleef told LiveScience.com.
These results cold be used at the workplace, where anger can be an effective motivation, but employers should be careful because this works only for some people and in certain circumstances.
“It's unlikely to work when there is a lot of stress, pressing deadlines, or when there is a lot of noise in the background,” van Kleef said.
“But anger can work when people are in a relaxed environment, because then the anger will tell them they basically need to work harder.”
The research is published in the latest issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.