Pretty much everyone will sometimes struggle with anger at work. People fear the wrath of abusive supervisors, suppress anger to maintain a façade of professionalism, or vent anger toward co-workers who are, fairly or not, targets. Reactions to anger in the workplace can be strong, but they’re not always effective.
As scholars who also fall prey to the pitfalls of anger ourselves, we are fascinated by anger. We have studied the causes, underlying processes and consequences of anger from the perspectives of management, psychology, marketing and negotiations.
We recently reviewed more than 400 research articles across psychology, business and related fields on topics ranging from brain activity to negotiation to race relations. Yet despite the ubiquity of anger in the workplace and the decades of anger research that exists across a number of fields, we found no straightforward way to understand the complexity of the life cycle of anger and how to manage it most effectively.
As we dived more deeply into the research literature, though, we realized that simply reframing how we think about anger could provide a novel, flexible framework for how to deal with this emotion in daily life. Our suggestion: Think of anger as a flow of emotion, like water through a garden hose.
By thinking of the flow of anger, you can unpack its key dimensions: its path and strength. Understanding whether the hose is pointed effectively and whether the strength of the stream is appropriate are critical for knowing when, how and why to focus or redirect the anger and amplify or weaken its intensity.
When tempers flare, sometimes innocent bystanders take the heat.
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The direction of anger
Imagine a co-worker charges into your office, yelling, breathing heavily, face reddened, veins bulging. Even if you are simply an unsuspecting colleague who happened to have your door open, your attention is undoubtedly now fixed on your co-worker.
Are you the target of their anger for something you did, or merely an observer of their anger at someone else?
If you are an undeserving target, do you try to reframe the issue so that the angry person will realize the anger is better directed elsewhere?
If you are the observer, you also have a choice about whether to ignore your co-worker’s anger or help them redirect it to a more effective outlet. You might simply listen empathetically while they let off steam, perhaps pointing out the relative risks and benefits of their taking their complaints to the supervisor.
You are deciding, in effect, what suggestions to make about the direction of this person’s anger.
The key to effectively managing the direction of anger is to manage the attention of those in the room. Reshaping how angry people attribute blame, for example, can help people take another person’s perspective or understand the situation in a new way, directing the flow more…
