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hello I'm Steve ghulami editorial director at knowledge a warden and today I'm speaking with Mary Schweitzer who is
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a pro is a professor of operations information and decisions at the warden school and with Jeremy Yip who is
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professor of management at Georgetown University thank you both for joining us today
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there's your dangerous and so today we're going to talk about your research
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on the impact of anger in the workplace and the title of your paper is losing your temper and your perspective anger
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reduces perspective-taking so let's start with just the title of the paper itself and specifically that term
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perspective-taking so Jeremy can you define that for us in this context yeah perspective-taking is a cognitive
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process that involves recognizing differences and making inferences about how others view a situation when people
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engage in perspective-taking they often form mental representations of a particular situation for themselves and
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for others that overlap enables people to be able to bridge differences between percent of perceptions interests and
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backgrounds perspective-taking is closely tied to conflict in that poor perspective-taking is often associated
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with conflict and in this paper we explore an emotion that's commonly associated with conflict anger and it's
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and examine whether anger may actually impair perspective-taking and potentially fuel conflict okay and
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in the paper you talk specifically about two different kinds of anger one is incidental anchor the other one's
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integral anchor Maurice could you help us figure out what the difference is between those two and and why that's
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important sure so there we explored two different kinds of anger in federal anger anger that
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might bleed over from one case into another so imagine you have an argument with your spouse and then you go into an
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important meeting at work those two cases could be completely unrelated but that anger might carry over and still
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influence the way you behave and act in that second situation so many of our studies we look at
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incidental anger anger that's just carrying over from one case into another it's a more conservative test that we're
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just looking at that pure emotion and what we consistently find is that the motions we have from one setting really
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do carry over to unrelated settings in contrast integral anger is anger that I feel toward that same person or about
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that same issue that bleeds over from one case to another and in that case it might be quite relevant so it could be
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that I'm upset with a co-worker and I'm dealing with that co-worker in a second
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case and that emotion that I'm feeling could be informative and relevant in how
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I'm dealing with that person and so here when we think about conflict settings
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what we're showing is that even incidental anger anger from an unrelated source can really impair
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perspective-taking and it's certainly the case that integral anger that is anger I feel
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about a particular situation or a person is going to influence how I deal with that same situation or person okay so
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let's get to the why then so to Jeremy why why does anger impact prospective
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taking in these cases yeah it was something that we thought very carefully and deeply about what might explain why
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anger diminishes perspective-taking and in our work we found that when people feel angry they experience elevated
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levels of arousal and that interferes with their ability to think carefully and deliberately which reduces
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perspective-taking we can look at emotions according to valence and magnitude and
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what we're finding here is that anger is a negative valence high arousal emotion
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can I just stop you for a second can you just define what valence means in this context okay yeah valence refers to
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whether it's positive or negative and in this case anger is a negative emotion that also
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tends to be higher in terms of energy or arousal and when people feel or experience greater arousal they tend to
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be more likely to rely on heuristics what's valuable about our work is that we were also able to shed some insight
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into the puzzle about how emotions influence cognition prior work has found that when people feel happy they tend to
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exhibit impaired perspective taking similarly when people are anxious they tend to struggle with perspective taking
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and here our work finds that when people feel angry they tend to struggle with their perspective taking and what ties
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this all together is the role of arousal Maurice yeah I just add to that that that that essentially we're finding is
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that when people feel angry they're collapsing in on themselves they become far more egocentric and other work
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Jeremy and I have done together we're finding that basically anger which is this high arousal that is my heart's
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beating fast it's as high Roselyn motion I'm high an alert we're focusing in on
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ourselves and we're more likely to think about our own interests and it gets in
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the way of trying to think about things from somebody else's perspective so as
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Jen was explaining before we're trying to disentangle what we know in our heads
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from how other people are seeing and experiencing things and it's really hard
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to make that mental leap to really put ourselves in somebody else's shoes that
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perspective-taking requires this cognitive effort and we're finding is that the emotions we feel this anger
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that we feel is impairing that process and in fact that leads to what you call spirals correct conflict spirals yeah
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exactly right so so and Jeremy eluded this before that is negotiations or conflicts or disputes you know imagine
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your neighbor's dog bit a member of your family you might be angry about that
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angers a common theme in many conflict situations and what we're finding is that anger
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hums perspective-taking exactly the kind of skill you might need to try to resolve a conflict so whether it's at
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work or at home if you're feeling anger within a conflict situation it might
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make it even harder to resolve that so imagine we're going to court and as we're going to court if I can't take the
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other side's perspective I might be sure that the judge is going to rule in my
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favor and so now I'm gonna be less likely to accept any overtures to try to settle before we go to court I'm gonna
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escalate this conflict so I'm curious to know how you would study an emotion like
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anger in a lab setting so Jeremy King explained maybe a couple of the experiments that you did sure so
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we conducted six experiments in the lab and we our basic approach to these experiments was that we would induce the
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emotion and we used many different ways to induce emotion so for example we induced emotion by providing people with
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negative feedback or we had them watch a video in which an injustice occurred or
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we had them recall a time that they felt most angry and write about it they then
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completed measures of perspective-taking and here's where we were able to introduce some new ways of assessing
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perspective-taking in particular we assess perspective-taking through a scheduling task we told participants
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that they were that they needed to write an email and arrange a meeting time with
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a very important client who was based in California which was three hours behind
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their current time zone Eastern Time we were we looked at whether they wrote their messages using
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meeting times that were in Eastern time or in Pacific time and for those who wrote in Eastern time that reflected
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egocentrism on the other hand if they wrote it in Pacific time that reflected prospective taking and what we found was
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that consistently participants who felt angry tended to refer in their own eaters or to their
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own egocentric time zone Eastern Time we also assess perspective-taking using other measures where we present
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either a number which is which from one vantage point can look like a sixteen or
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four from another vantage point 91 as well as we ask them questions about who would they side with in terms of an
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insurance case when when attributing blame so there's a number of different ways that we induce anger and a number
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of different ways we assess anger or I'm sorry assess perspective-taking so so
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Maurice what do we do then with that information so we know that anger reduces perspective-taking
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what can employees and managers do when anger arises what should they be doing so so so the first thing to recognize is
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that perspective-taking is always an effortful and challenging process if not something we do well naturally and in
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any strategic decision any collaborative decision we need to work at perspective-taking
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so the first thing I would say is to is to be mindful of how important and challenging perspective thinking is and
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the second thing informed by a work is to recognize that how we feel can influence our ability to take
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perspective and when we feel anger in particular as well as any other high arousal emotion we should recognize that
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our ability to think about other people's perspectives is diminished that we're more likely to think egocentric
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alee that our tendency to focus in on ourselves becomes exacerbated by the high arousal emotion of anger or other
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related emotions so so we've got to check our emotions be mindful of that and recognize that we're going to be
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more likely to adopt an egocentric perspective so then all right there any Jeremy are there any specific techniques
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that you our manager can can hughes when these situations arise in our research we
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examine both incidental and integral anger and we were able to gain insight on how people can manage incidental
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anger in relation to their perspective taking what we found was that when people are made aware about the source
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of their incidental anger and they're able to infer that their anger is irrelevant to their particular social
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situation they're able to block the effects of anger and exhibit more perspective-taking the important point
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here or the important point here is to cultivate an awareness of our emotions and the sources and pinpoint the sources
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of our emotions so that we can judge whether they're relevant or irrelevant to the social situation at hand based on
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your research do you think that this would is does this not work in the case of integral anger as well as for
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instance if I'm fighting with someone in the moment about something very specific
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nor we're getting into an argument it's getting kind of heated is it useful to
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say I'm getting angry or you seem to be getting angry about this is that helpful
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in that moment as well do you think because I can see how would work in the case of you know I've had a bad morning
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and it might be helpful for me to say look I'm reacting this way because I had
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a terrible morning and this happened but in the case of integral anger does it does it I can almost see a case where it
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might cause a spiral to go further if you recognize the fact that I'm getting
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really mad do you think that that's true I I think that it is so I think we have
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to be careful we think about integral anger the anger could be integral with the same person or it could be the same
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situation or both and when we now vent about those issues they could actually make us angrier
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so we have to be careful on the other hand in general the more we can be cognizant of our emotions the more aware
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we are of our emotions and ideally as Jim was saying what an internal anger so I know that I'm
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angry about what my boss said to me at work and now I come home and I recognize the source of my anger I'm less likely
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to have that bleed into my interactions at home even when the even when the sources are integral recognizing what's
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making me angry can help us deal with that anger and recognize explicitly that this emotion is likely to influence our
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cognition that is where our work contributes to this growing body of work that's linking how we feel to how we
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think so speaking of that growing body of work 10 years ago maybe you know someone might have come to work and they
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would have been told check your baggage at the door work is work you don't you
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don't bring your problems here you just focus on work now it seems like the pendulum is swinging the other way and
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we are more inclined to acknowledge the power of emotion at work how do you think that's going to reshape management
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practice I think managers need to be aware of their own emotions and how it can affect their behavior but they also
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want to be attune to the effects of the emotional effects of their communication
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so when they use incendiary words whether it is directed at people in within their own workplace or outside
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competitors there's an opportunity or there's a chance that that may elicit
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anger among their audience of workers and that can have significant effects and consequences for how individuals
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behave to one another as well as how they behave towards the leader I think realizing this connection or
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this link between emotion and cognition is very important for managers to pay attention to yeah I'll just add to that
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that I think emotion is really integral to getting our world done a lot of emotion conveys
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information so if you have an employee who's angry about something that helps
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guide attention to that issue and maybe they're upset because something isn't
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working well and we should be paying more attention to that issue or in the workplace the motions that we express
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can help us accomplish different kinds of tasks so sometimes anger can be very motivating
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we're upset about some injustice and we're now motivated to address it or it
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could be that the the use of positive emotions can help us either bond together or serve a client or help us be
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excited when we sell a product that the motions that we have are really part of us and rather than trying to check our
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emotions at the door and assume that we're unemotional throughout the full day to recognize that there's
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information here and there's use for the emotions that we feel so part of this
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also I mean it seems to me that this could be letting a genie out of a bottle too for some managers right so in other
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words if I'm gonna start validating or acknowledging emotion in the workplace
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we'll get to a point where all's we're talking about our feelings about things
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and the works actually not getting done like we're is there a balance that needs
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to be found within that yeah I'd say absolutely so so clearly we don't want
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unregulated emotions running wild and instead we need to be careful about how we regulate our emotions I think the
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first step is just recognizing that we do feel these emotions and if we can attribute where that emotions coming
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from I think those two key steps how do I feel and why do I feel that way that's
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going to take us a pretty long way the third sort of next up would be figure out hey how do I change my emotions so
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it could be that I'm feeling upset about an interaction I had with a co-worker or
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a colleague I have to make an important strategic decision I know that if I go for a walk or I go
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to the gym or I talked to my other friend down the hall I'm going to clear my head in a way that's gonna allow me
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to think differently about this decision so I think it's it's that recognition to
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recognize how we feel why we feel that way and how we can change how we feel that can really help us make much much
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much better decisions and improve our interactions at work it's so Jeremy what
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what kinds of questions this research raised about anger that maybe you would want to explore next we became
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interested in exploring the role that anger may play within a team context so we currently have ongoing work that
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explores another topic of research that were both that we've collaborated on
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trash-talking and in particular we look at trash-talking when leaders trash talk
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is there a functional benefit to doing so within groups and our evidence suggests that when that in-group members
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when in-group members witness a trash-talking leader they actually that trash-talking can build cohesion and
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identification with their organization so it really depends on what these aggressive what this aggressive these
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aggressive words this incendiary language what it's targeted at when it's
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targeted at outside of a particular organization or in-group it may actually have functional benefits and that anger
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that is elicited may essentially serve as a call to action to be able to have a group of people coalesce around a
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particular cause and pursue it okay Maurice where do you think you would take this research next well I think we
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can think about a series of other related emotions so we've done some really
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work on anger and disgust and sadness and happiness to think about the sort of broader set of emotions I think
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understanding how we think about emotions and recognize our own emotions and the interplay of the emotions that
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you're expressing and how that interacts my thinking and cognition those are all
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areas that were eager to explore and and I think this trash-talking work is particularly interesting when we don't
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always behave in a civil way with each other and it's easy to trigger emotions
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and other people and sometimes you might do it inadvertently in ways that cause other people to act in ways that
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surprised us but in hindsight probably shouldn't well thank you both very much
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for joining us today it's a topic that I think is you know it touches everyone so
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I think it's a it's a great one to explore thanks very much thank you thank
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you for more insight from knowledge at Wharton please visit knowledge Wharton UPenn edu
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