Men: this study suggests it ’s a really bad idea to cry in front of your colleagues

By Alex Fradera We’re supposed to be hungry for workplace feedback: after all, it can help us to eliminate blind spots in our self-knowledge, give us focus and surpass relationship issues. Often, though, it can be a bit hard to take. On the wrong day, when the feedback’s particularly upsetting, it may even bring us to tears. If this happens to you and you’re a man, according to new research in the Journal of Applied Psychology, it could spell bad news for your career prospects. Daphna Motro and Aleksander Ellis from the University of Arizona recruited 169 adults based in the US, with an average age 32 and mostly in active employment, and presented them with one of several versions of a 6-minute video showing a performance evaluation of a grocery store manager named Pat: a scripted role performed by actors in their early twenties, a male one in some videos, a female one in others. Participants were asked to imagine they were the supervisor, and the video was staged so that they viewed the action over the shoulder of the supervisor with Pat right in front of them. The evaluation wasn’t good: Pat had recently been rude, frequently late, and oversaw declining sales. In some versions of the video, this feedback was too much, provoking male or female Pat to tears. In post-viewing ratings of how typical the behaviour in the meeting was, participants who viewed the version featuring a tearful female Pat didn’t find her behaviour any more strange than participants who view...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Gender Occupational Source Type: blogs