MANAGEMENT
ANGER AT WORK: HOW NEGATIVE EMOTIONS CLOUD JUDGMENT
Anger is a particularly negative emotion in the workplace. It can rub off on managers, subordinates or co-workers, making them keep their distance or walk on eggshells around the person who is upset. New research from Maurice Schweitzer, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and Jeremy Yip, management professor at Georgetown University, shows that being angry at work can create even more signifi cant problems. Their research — based on six experiments — reveals that angry people often lose the ability to see problems from another point of view, which can hamper eff orts to resolve confl ict. Schweitzer and Yip spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about their paper, “Losing Your Temper and Your Perspective: Anger Reduces Perspective- Taking,” which was published in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
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DOMmagazine.com | july 2019
Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s start with the title of your paper, specifi cally the term perspective- taking. Can you defi ne that?
Jeremy Yip: Perspective-taking is a cognitive process that involves recognizing diff erences and making inferences about how others view a situation. When people engage in perspective-taking, they often form mental representations of a particular situation for themselves and for others. That overlap enables people to be able to bridge diff erences of perceptions, interests and backgrounds. Perspective-taking is closely tied to confl ict, in that poor perspective- taking is often associated with confl ict. In this paper, we explore an emotion that’s commonly associated with confl ict — anger. We examine whether anger may actually impair perspective-taking and potentially fuel confl ict.
Knowledge@Wharton: In the paper, you talk about incidental anger and integral anger. What is the diff erence between the two?
Maurice Schweitzer: Incidental anger is anger that might bleed over from one case into another. Imagine you have an argument with your spouse, and then you go into an important meeting at work. Those two cases could be completely unrelated, but that anger might carry over and still infl uence the way you behave and act in that second situation. In many of our studies, we look at incidental anger with some more conservative tests that just look at that pure emotion. What we consistently fi nd is that the emotions we have from one setting really do carry over to unrelated settings. In contrast, integral anger is anger that I feel toward that same person or about that same issue that bleeds over from one case to another. In that case,
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