Handling Workplace Anger Correctly Leads to Positive Outcome

If employees and employers alike are able to handle workplace episodes where one of the people working there has an fit of anger, then the entire situation could have a positive outcome.

However, in order for this to happen, those responding to the situation are not allowed to take care of things improperly. They need to respond in such a way so as to give a positive spin on the entire situation, in a way that provides the angry person with a way of externalizing their feelings.

Traditionally, workplace anger is viewed as an exclusively bad thing by employees and employers alike, and numerous steps have been taken at companies around the world to ensure it never surfaces in a damaging way.

But Temple University Fox School of Business professor Dr. Deanna Geddes explains in a new article that even emotions as intense as anger can be directed towards a beneficial outcome, if they are responded to with compassion, rather than irritation.

This type of answer needs to come from managers and co-workers alike. It's only in this way that positive changes can take place at the workplace, the expert explains. All other approaches of quelling anger fail, and those measures involving punishment are the worst-off for everyone.

“When companies choose to sanction organizational members expressing deviant anger, these actions may divert attention and resources from correcting the initial, anger-provoking event that triggered the employee’s emotional outburst,” the expert writes in a new paper accompanying the findings.

Geddes provides a detailed description of how the new method can be applied in the latest issue of the journal Human Relations, PsychCentral reports. The investigation that led to this conclusions was conducted on about 194 participants, all of whom witnessed at least one such incident at work.

Whenever people in upper management show “an active interest in addressing underlying issues that prompted employee anger, perceptions of improved situations increase significantly,” the team writes in the new journal entry.

“Business codes of conduct are often about what we shouldn’t do as an angry employee in emotional episodes, while few, if any, tend to address our role as observers of emotional episodes,” the experts go on to say.

“Such guidelines, if available, could expand to include positive suggestions for those who witness, judge and respond to angry employees – formally or informally. Some of the most transformational conversations come about through expressed anger,” Geddes concludes.