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Progressive employers often believe that a productive, successful team is an office full of positive, smiling people. However, the researchers concluded that if you make employees look more cheerful and more cheerful than they really feel, you can achieve the opposite result — emotional exhaustion and withdrawal. Women are particularly affected by this, as they are more often expected to show happiness and joy.
The craze for a positive work attitude appeared not so long ago under the influence of research Why happy employees are 12% more productive / Fast Company about the relationship between employee productivity and their good mood. It would seem that attempts to increase employee satisfaction should benefit both the employees themselves and the management. However, corporate happiness strategies lead to undesirable results quite quickly.
Depending on where you work, attempts to raise your morale can look different: starting from Friday pizza and ending with instructions for employees of the service cafeteria to portray joy from early morning until late at night. In the long run, such superficial manipulative techniques will not do anything, as they will quickly become familiar and cease to impress.
Sometimes even really good intentions — such as the opportunity to work from home — can lead to a weakening of the boundaries between work and private life. This is dangerous because the tacit ban on personal emotions will spread to all spheres of life.
The right balance can be maintained when the employer tries to create a warm working atmosphere and at the same time understands that employees have a life outside of work, which inevitably affects their mood. There is no need to put everything on the altar of productivity, while losing respect for the personal lives of employees.
The need to portray joy for a long time is fraught with physical and mental health problems, ranging from depression to diseases of the cardiovascular system.
You cannot become happier by constantly suppressing negative emotions.
The researchers came For a better workday, smile like you mean it / MSUToday / Michigan State University to the conclusion that a strained duty smile spoils the mood of its owner and may even lead to the fact that a person wants to quit his job. It was also noticed that women find it harder to suppress negative emotions than men.
While positivity increases productivity, irritability and skepticism also have a lot of advantages.
Dissatisfaction is a light alarm that informs us that we are faced with an unfamiliar and potentially problematic situation. As a result, we subconsciously become alert and focus.
An angry person tends to distinguish better between strong and weak arguments than a neutral-minded interlocutor. This is due to the fact that irritation triggers the mechanisms of analytical processing of information.
A slight depression sometimes makes us more careful and attentive to details. Mood decline stimulates critical thinking and communication skills.
Anger can serve as an impetus to search for non-standard solutions. In small doses, anger stimulates creativity, and this is because there is a lot of energy in anger.
However, the surge of creativity provoked by anger does not always last long. Anger is a very exhausting emotion. Therefore, angry people are able to generate interesting ideas quickly, but not for long.
Alas, gender inequality extends to the right to express one's own emotions. We often see sullen men in high positions. But women have to balance on the edge of a knife.
On the one hand, few people will want to entrust responsible work to an overly emotional lady. A group of researchers at the Technical University of Munich found out Key to promotion for women: don’t smile / The Telegraph that women who radiate excessive cheerfulness are less likely to get high positions. On the other hand, an aggressive, impenetrable careerist is also unlikely to be successful with the team, superiors and business partners.
Undisguised ambition and refusal to be "pleasant to talk to" is a luxury that few working women can afford.
Women who suppress their true emotions often feel unhappy. This is especially common among female employees in the service and customer support sectors.
The efforts that women in these fields have to spend on controlling their own emotions in order to create the right mood in others are called emotional labor. By and large, this means double work: they not only technically perform their duties, but also exploit their femininity.
The burden of emotional labor lies mainly on the representatives of the working class. It is easier for highly qualified employees to win back the right to be sullen than for women employed in the service sector.
All employees (and especially women) benefit when their emotional state is not dictated by management and when they are not being manipulated for the benefit of the company.
No matter what efforts managers make to set up a positive team, in the long run it will not make anyone work faster and better. A sullen professional is in no way inferior to a cheerful professional, and he is certainly more valuable than a satisfied amateur.
