Office Pressure Cookers Stewing Up 'Desk Rage'

By LISA GIRION

Dec. 10, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

As a human resources executive responsible for hundreds of insurance company employees, Maggie Jennings saw her share of office temper tantrums--arguments between co-workers, pen-throwing managers and even a guy who kicked in his computer screen.

Jennings’ experience is not unique. Two new studies involving thousands of people suggest a significant portion of the American work force is suffering everything from uncomfortable and distracting incivilities to stress-induced attacks on trash cans, keyboards and even co-workers--all expressions of what one survey called “desk rage.”

After 30 years in the field and weary of struggling to bridge the gulf between employee needs and corporate demands, Jennings, a 52-year-old Long Island resident, jumped at an early retirement offer last spring.

“Once in a while, out of sheer frustration, I’d just go to the ladies’ room and close the cubicle and cry,” said Jennings, who channeled her angst by launching a gripe site called thisjobstinks.com. “After a while, I realized there was little I could do. I hated my job and used to mutter in my head, ‘This job stinks.’ ”

Nearly a third of 1,305 workers who responded to the telephone survey on desk rage admitted to yelling at someone in the office, and 65% said workplace stress is at least occasionally a problem for them. Work stress had driven 23% of the respondents to tears, and 34% blamed their jobs for a loss of sleep.

While workplace stress is nothing new, many experts and workers said several economic and social trends have intensified it, or at least heightened sensitivity to it. Layoffs have instilled a lingering sense of job insecurity in many workers, while making it more difficult to meet productivity demands that have risen dramatically.

At the same time, an increasingly fluid and diverse work force that includes more women, more dual-career couples and more generations exacerbates on-the-job tensions, they said. And there’s a growing sense that workplace innovations, from cell phones to e-mail, are really high-tech leashes that make it impossible to ever really escape.

“There seems to be a real underlying tension in the workplace today that I don’t remember existing 10 or 15 years ago,” said Sean Hutchinson, president of Integra Realty Resources Inc., a New York-based real estate advisory and appraisal firm that commissioned the desk rage survey in response to anecdotal reports from clients across the country.

“With the booming economy and people having to work long hours with tight deadlines, and in some cases limited resources, and a tight labor market, it’s a difficult time for people,” Hutchinson said. “It’s really putting people in a pressure cooker.”

While workplace stress occasionally erupts into highly publicized incidents of violence and death--at an estimated cost to business of $4.2 billion a year--more ordinary expressions of job frustration also contribute to the toll on employers and employees. Nearly one in five of the desk rage survey respondents said stress had caused them to quit a job, and one in eight said it had prompted them to call in sick.

A separate study to be published in the quarterly journal Organizational Dynamics found that workers who had been treated rudely had a variety of reactions that were bad for business. Half said they lost work time worrying about the rude behavior directed toward them. A third admitted to intentionally reducing their commitment to the company. Nearly a quarter said they stopped doing their best work, and 12% quit their jobs.

“The breadth of the impact of [rudeness] was surprising for us,” said Christine M. Pearson of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, one of three researchers who interviewed and surveyed nearly 1,500 people on workplace incivility.

If workplace stress is bad for business, coping with it is big business. It has become an industry employing legions of organizational psychologists, security agents and researchers. And it is grist for a spate of recent books that suggest it is indeed a jungle out there, including “Anger and Conflict in the Work Place,” “Managing Workplace Negativity” and “Violence at Work: How to Safeguard Your Firm.”

Yet many employers fail to address seemingly small or isolated office outbursts, and that’s a big mistake, said Weldon L. Kennedy, former deputy director of the FBI and now vice chairman of Guardsmark Inc., an international private security firm.

“If you ignore that kind of behavior or let it slide and think they’ll be better tomorrow, that’s the very kind of issue that turns into one of those that goes berserk,” Kennedy said. “And later people will say, ‘Well, you know, I noticed him kick his waste can.’ ”

Many employers may have no idea of the level of incivility in their workplace because the victims often leave quietly, Pearson said. “People who were targets tended to not report the real reason for their departure. They were afraid it might make them look like wimps or it might follow them.”

One such victim, a Bay Area woman in her 20s, said she left her last job in September after four months when a senior member of her department, an older man known for losing his temper, “flipped out.”

“He stormed into my office and started screaming and yelling every swear word in the book,” said the woman, who has gone on to a new job and asked that she not be named. “Then he went back to his office and started throwing things and slamming doors. I felt physically scared and threatened.”

Another woman, a radio advertising saleswoman in the Midwest, said she had to cope with her own sense of rage when a corporate takeover added a third station to her workload, nearly doubling the amount of telephone calls, proposals and trips she had to make. She found herself mad at everyone and everything, from other drivers to her laundry.

“It became this unbelievable push for the bottom line at the expense of my life,” she said. “I had no time for me. I would get angry on Saturdays, almost angrily driving because I couldn’t get my errands done fast enough. It almost crashes in on you on Saturdays.”

On a bicycle ride one day, she suddenly noticed that she was pedaling “angrily” to the Wicked Witch of the West’s theme from the ‘Wizard of Oz.” She quit in September.

Because the merger had overwhelmed the saleswoman with more work than she could handle, she was in a state of what Michigan-based business consultant Leslie Charles calls “process deprivation.”

“We’re leading these nonstop lives, and we’re continuing to accelerate the pace,” said Charles, author of “Why Is Everyone So Cranky?” (Hyperion, 1999). “We’re surrounded by noise and distractions. And we’re so preoccupied with what we’re doing and what’s next that we have an inability to process what’s just happened or what’s bugging us. We’re overwhelmed, overworked, overscheduled and overspent.”

To keep up, many people resort to multi-tasking, an attempt to handle many jobs at once, which usually only adds to their aggravation, said Jerry Rubenstein, a professor of counselor education at the University of Rochester.

“The brain tends to like to function linearly. What we’re doing is creating overload situations,” Rubenstein said. “Most people in the workplace are functioning in the yellow zone, which means ‘Pay attention,’ and it doesn’t take much to take them into the red zone, which is ‘Danger.’ ”

Rubenstein, a psychologist who helps patients manage their anger, said he often sees people on the edge of the danger zone.

Awareness of workplace stress and its adverse effects is growing, said Paul E. Spector, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of South Florida, who has been studying desk-kicking and other counterproductive work behavior for 25 years.

On anonymous questionnaires, a wide variety of employees have confessed a great deal to Spector and his associates. Two-thirds admit to having “tried to look busy while doing nothing,” and 23% say they have “started an argument with a co-worker.” A little more than 6% of workers admit to having purposely damaged work equipment or property, and 28.4% say they have purposely worked slowly when things needed to get done.

Employers need to look at such behavior as an expression of need, said Jeff Krause, manager of consultation services for Minnesota-based CIGNA Behavioral Health.

Krause supervises a team of eight psychologists who offer behavioral advice by telephone for managers at 650 client companies with 1.5 million employees. Krause said the calls range from helping a manager approach an employee about a bad breath problem affecting other workers to “I’ve got an employee who’s locked herself in her car. What do I do?”

Although such employee assistance programs began in the 1960s to prevent perceived personal problems from affecting an employee’s job performance, Krause said, today’s employers are more likely to view such troubles as at least partially work-based.

“If desk rage had been coming up as a term 15 years ago, the assumption we would have made is, there is something going on in that person’s home and they are bringing it to work,” he said. “Now, while what we are seeing is an increase in stresses at work and home, work is seen as the culprit and we have to look at that.”

Jennings, the former human resources executive, now works part-time as a consultant, and work rage is still keeping her busy. Last week, she was called in to counsel a supervisor who had thrown a book across the room while she was talking to an employee.

“I think they just can’t control it anymore,” Jennings said. “They reach a point where they explode.”

Inside

* Employers screen out aggressive applicants. W4

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Desk Rage

If your workplace is fraught with stress--and even rage--you’re not alone. In a recent national telephone survey of 1,305 employed adults, 13% of them reported they or their co-workers have committed an act that they would describe as “desk rage” out of stress or anger.

Workplace stress has caused me to:

Cry: 23%

Quit: 19%

Lose sleep: 34%

Yell at co-worker: 29%

Eat chocolate: 26%

Smoke: 16%

Call in sick: 12%

Drink more alcohol: 11%

Hit a co-worker: 2%

I work in a place where people have:

Yelled: 42%