All the Rage
His co-workers called him the “Taz”--and it was not a term of endearment.
Ted H., a 48-year-old utility company employee in San Diego, admits that he often got so mad at work that he screamed at people on his shop floor at the top of his lungs. When he took on fellow workers and supervisors, his face turned red and his chest tightened. “I could hear my heart pounding in my ears,” he says today, calmly.
Outbursts that reminded fellow employees of the Tazmanian devil in Warner Bros. cartoons never escalated into violence, he says, but they did lead to poor work reviews and often carried over into his home, threatening his marriage as well. After two co-workers told their supervisor that they were frightened by him, Ted called his firm’s employee assistance program, which referred him to anger-management classes run by Jay Schneider and Gina Simmons in San Diego.
There, Ted dug into the roots of his rage--disenchantment with his career progress, increased workload, mistrust of management. Sitting in a conference room with 20 others over six nights, he learned such behavioral techniques as taking responsibility and disengaging to stop a “rage attack.” And he learned one other valuable thing: that he wasn’t the only one mad at work, that, in his words, “you’re not some weirdo from Mars.”
There is nothing extraterrestrial about anger in the workplace. A nationwide survey by the Princeton, N.J.-based Gallup Organization earlier this summer found that four out of 10 workers generally feel at least a little mad at work. Although that number was down from a similar poll last year, experts were disturbed to learn that so many people harbor such negative feelings.
“That is a troublesome finding,” says Batia Wiesenfeld, an assistant professor of management at New York University and co-author of a report, based on the Gallup poll, that was conducted for the Marlin Co., a publisher of company information.
Wiesenfeld says anger robs companies of productivity. “It makes it a lot more difficult to make teams work effectively.”
Human resource managers know that much. Many also agree that anger is increasing in the workplace. But few have specific policies or programs to assess and reduce such emotions.
In most cases, anger doesn’t trigger a response from management until there is a threat of violence or it clearly hampers productivity. Often the problem is left for untrained supervisors to handle, and not everyone thinks anger-management counseling--which has grown into a cottage industry--is the right way to go.
Where there is very little debate is on the causes of the increased anger in corporate America. “The biggest one is that the post-war psychological contract has been violated,” Wiesenfeld says. “Even when times are good, people can be laid off at any second, and they are expected to work extraordinarily hard. There is constant change in organizations. Paternalism is really dead.”
All of this has contributed to a decline in employee morale, says Art Hershey, a 35-year human resources manager who is now vice president of Smyth, Fuchs Interim Inc., an outplacement firm in Los Angeles. “If morale goes down, you have very negative feelings that develop, and anger is one of them,” Hershey says.
Many people also are spending more time at work, and they are working more closely with one another in smaller groups and teams, creating more settings for emotions to be exhibited and shared by workers.
At the same time, many companies have established zero-tolerance policies on sexual and other forms of harassment. While that has helped reduce violent acts at work--reported workplace assaults in California have declined from nearly 4,700 in 1993 to 3,500 in 1996--some experts and workers complain that it has chilled work relations, leading sometimes to a subtle worsening of anger and resentment.
“Back in the old days, when you got into an argument, you’d blow it away,” says a 54-year-old manufacturing worker in the Southland. Recently, he says, he was forced to seek counseling or face possible termination because he got angry, once, at a fellow worker. “Today they want you to work in an environment where you can’t raise your voice.”
“We are taught that anger is not something to talk about,” says Mitch Messer, director of the Anger Institute in Chicago, which has six counselors. He says most companies deal with angry employees by punishing them or by giving them motivational training.
“What we do is teach a supervisor to peel an anger artichoke away,” says Messer, who is an adherent of Alfred Adler, a Freud contemporary who created the concept of the inferiority complex. Messer believes a lot of anger is rooted in self-contempt and feelings of insecurity. But the real culprits, he says, generally are inept, insensitive supervisors.
Messer recalls a recent case in which a director of a medical lab came into work one day and was told by her boss to move out of her office and into another to make space for a new worker.
“She had a fit. She took it personally, as if it were a victimization,” Messer says. “What angered her the most was that she felt good for nothing after six years.” Messer says he helped the lab director to disengage, to reclaim her self-worth. She moved into the new office, he says, and it turned out to be nicer than the old one.
In a recent survey cited by Workforce magazine, nearly two-thirds of human resource managers acknowledged that their companies haven’t been as employee-friendly as they’ve promised. But just as many said employees held unrealistic expectations about what they could expect from their employers.
At Kaiser Permanente, the state’s large health maintenance organization, every facility has a “threat management team,” says Carol Erken, a Kaiser human resources director. She says the team develops guidelines on identifying and managing potentially threatening incidents.
Erken says she does not think employee anger has increased at her Woodland Hills, Panorama City and Bakersfield facilities. But she says she does hear of more workers grappling with financial and personal issues. Erken says Kaiser has staff counselors who do anger-management training.
Most companies typically set up employee assistance programs by contracting out counseling and psychiatric services. Although EAPs most often are used to help employees with substance abuse or personal problems, an increasing number of people are turning to them for work-related emotional problems, including anger.
Dr. Stephen Heidel, president of Integrated Insights in San Diego, provides EAPs for many companies. He says referrals about angry workers have grown significantly in recent years, and the cases cut across blue-collar and white-collar industries.
Heidel administers what he calls a psychiatric fitness-for-duty exam or risk assessment, looking for signs of post-traumatic stress, depression, drug use or other underlying disorders. Heidel remembers one senior manager he worked with--a team leader who suddenly became a loose cannon, frequently getting upset and becoming unable to provide leadership. Heidel learned the man had gone through a divorce and was drinking heavily. “It required kind of working through issues to get him on stable footing,” he said.
He recalled one other case--far more disturbing but not uncommon. The wholesale company was undergoing a reorganization. A senior sales executive who had been with the firm for 20 years told his boss: “Three years ago when the company reorganized, I went home and got a gun and sat outside the main entrance and waited for four hours.”
Upon hearing that, the company reacted with stark terror, said Heidel, who advised management to make this executive an offer to leave that he couldn’t refuse. The employee took the severance package and left.
While these cases aren’t rare, most instances of employee rage present more risk of decreased productivity than of violence. What is important in the work setting, says Dr. Jeffrey Kahn, a New York psychiatrist and president of WorkPsych Associates, “is to draw a distinction between inappropriate physical and verbal displays of anger and appropriate opportunities to discuss anger and its causes.”
Kahn doesn’t necessarily think anger-management counseling is the best route. Rather, he says, it may be more effective to set up adequate outlets for people to discuss or express anger and to feel more accepted and that they are being treated fairly. “In the absence of that,” he says, “you’re intensifying the anger.”
Learning to Deal With Your Anger
As such, some workplace analysts think forcing employees to enroll in anger-management counseling can backfire. Workers may feel resentful or stigmatized. Some experts advise that employers should try to do more to create a warmer, friendlier physical environment. Improved lighting and ventilation can make a difference. Even so, anger-management classes are increasing, and some of the techniques they teach are widely accepted by health-care professionals.
For the last four years, Jay Schneider, a licensed clinical social worker, and Gina Simmons, a psychologist, have worked with a new group every six weeks. Each group has about 20 people--about half of them referred to the program or required to take it by their employers. The six-week program costs $180, a fee that most employers spring for. Unlike group therapy, the sessions are more didactic. In six 90-minute sessions spread out over six weeks, Schneider and Simmons follow a rigorous program: the first stage--accepting responsibility for anger.
“We challenge people’s ideas that it’s everybody else’s fault,” Simmons says.
The second session involves a discussion of the traits and health dangers of being angry a lot--greater risk for heart disease and hypertension. In the third week, Simmons says, participants are taught “cognitive restructuring”--training one’s mind to think differently when angry.
“We talk about how anger is a cover-up for other emotions like hurt or fear or grief, so often it is more effective to say what I am hurt about rather than lashing out,” she says. Next, Schneider and Simmons teach behavioral techniques for people to use when they are on the verge of an anger episode--things that soothe the mind and body, such as taking a time-out, going for a walk, breathing deeply, writing a note or playing music. Their fifth session addresses effective listening and communication skills, resolving conflicts and handling things like rumors. The last session is a review.
“We emphasize that they are responsible for those feelings,” says Simmons. “A lot of people feel like they have a right to it. That is the heart of it, to help people to get past that.”
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ALL THE RAGE
More than four out of 10 workers say they are mad at work. But most also know that interpersonal skills--or getting along well with others at work--is crucial in performing well on the job.
How do you generally feel at work? Angry?
Extremely: 2%
Quite a bit: 4%
Somewhat: 12%
A little: 24%
Not at all: 58%
*
Would you say these skills are “very important” to do your job well?
Interpersonal skills: 71%
Mathematical: 38%
Language skills: 59%
Interacting well emotionally: 49%
Creative skills: 37%
*
Source: Marlin Co., New Haven, Conn. Note: Survey conducted by the Gallup Organization in summer 1998 of 800 adults nationwide. The poll’s overall margin of error is plus or minus 4 percentage points.
