If you cry at work, pretend it’s because you’re very passionate about … – Boing Boing

Posted: March 10, 2017 at 2:41 am

Research has shown that crying at work comes off as unprofessional and weakens your promotion prospects -- and surveys suggest that people cry at work a lot, anyway. So how can you balance your human emotional needs with the necessity of presenting yourself as a productive unit of gut-flora for the transhuman, immortal artificial life form that has absorbed you?

In a 2016 paper published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, a group of business-school researchers led by Harvard doctoral candidate Elizabeth Baily Wolf present the results of a study on how people perceive their co-workers' tears, and which emotional explanations are most favorably perceived.

They evaluated five notional explanations for crying at work -- fighting with co-workers, being assigned undesirable work, being discriminated against, negotiating for higher pay, and being overcome with passion for your job -- and found that subjects viewed the final explanation (overwhelming workplace passion that spills over into tears) as reflecting the most workplace competence.

Of course, this strategy only works for work-related tears, and sometimes people cry at work for personal reasons (though if spotted, you could try to pawn it off on the job). Nevertheless, this dynamic tends to truly crystallize in the performance review, the best known venue for workplace crying. If involuntary tears start welling up during harsh criticism from the boss, instead of apologizing for getting emotional, blame them on passion for your job. The boss might perceive the tears as noble, even endearing, rather than weak.

Workers are generally told to leave their tears at home. Jennifer Porter, a managing partner at the Boda Group, an executive coaching firm, advises clientsparticularly womennot to cry on the job.

If you can find strategies to not cry at work, it's in your career best interests, she said. Wolfs research confirmed that holding back tears still beats all other options. In one of her experiments, when given three options for a potential project partner, participants chose the person who hid distress over someone who admitted to cryingno matter what the reason.

Managing perceptions of distress at work: Reframing emotion as passion [Elizabeth Baily Wolf, Jooa Julia Lee, Sunita Sah and Alison Wood Brooks/Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes]

The Experts Guide to Crying at Work [Rebecca Greenfield/Bloomberg]

(via Naked Capitalism)

report this ad

Donald Trumps new FCC boss, Ajit Pai, has nuked an Obama-era rule that banned ISPs from selling off your browsing data, location, financial and health information, childrens information, Social Security Number and contents of your messages, without your permission. The now-defunct rule also required ISPs to notify you when they got hacked and your sensitive []

The GOP is advocating for a Border Adjustment Tax, which is something like a complicated Value Added Tax that is meant to encourage companies to on-shore or re-shore their manufacturing, without raising prices for Americans (because the US dollar is supposed to rise by up to 25% (!) as a result), while removing the complexity []

It took barely a year for the rebooted Radio Shack now a front for Sprint, backed by the same hedge fund that lost its shirt investing in American Apparel to go bust again, despite a $50M line of credit and $25M in loans. (via /.)

Whether youre stranded in the Yukon territory after a crash airplane landingor hiding froma Jason impersonator, this handy5-in-1 Survival Bracelet will provide the tools you need to come out safely on the other side.This 9-inchbracelet holsters aa 10.5-footlong rope for creating fishing lines, making traps, binding rafts or whatever your imagination can conjure. Thats just []

This is how it happens: the bad guys break into computers, steal all the information, and then Yahoo! sells for a whole lot less. (Comparatively.) After that, white hat hackers are called in to crack the samesusceptible networks, evaluate their security, and plug the holes in the digital dam, all for a very cool wage. []

Swiss Army Knives are pretty standard everyday carry items for their utilitarian bent, which has made them the standard bearer for competing EDC multi-tools. This one, however, is a little different. Its been engineered specifically for smokers.The beauty ofThe High Knifeis that it comeswith all the tools you would expect from a Swiss Army Knifea []

report this ad

Read the original post:
If you cry at work, pretend it's because you're very passionate about ... - Boing Boing

Related Posts