Showing anger 'is good for career' | Hacker News Reader

Showing anger 'is good for career'

telegraph.co.uk

21 pointsbaha_man11 comments

I wish articles like this would provide more detail (such as a link to the study itself). At the moment I don't know how to act on this information. It was a survey, so what exactly were the questions? How were "those who keep a check on their frustrations" determined? Lacking that, it's difficult to guess which way causation worked. Were these frustrated people failing because they didn't express anger, or were they more likely to reply that they had unexpressed anger because they were not doing well personally and professionally? Or maybe the causation is that successful people feel more free to express themselves while unsuccessful people don't like to draw attention to themselves.

The BBC article on the same study (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7918622.stm) mentioned that "Outright fury was destructive, the researchers added", which sounds like an important caveat. If I were convinced that this survey shows that anger leads to creating value, I'd like more detail on constructive ways to express anger.

Why, look, it's another chance to flog my pet peeve!

Here's the problem: The citation in the news article looks like this:

A recent study published in the Journal of Social Behaviour and Personality...

Visit the page of that journal and you can see a link to their "journal online". But the page at the end of the link is hilariously awful:

Your university's subscription to this Journal has just become even better value!

Notice the complete lack of useful facilities for the general public -- and just about everybody else, for that matter. I can't even find a browseable homepage of the latest issue of this journal. There's a search box that I can type in, but I can't find a recent reference to the only scientist mentioned in the news article. When I do click on a random paper from the journal I can't read it unless I buy it, and I can't buy it or even see the price without registering.

They say expressing anger is good for your career. So let me advance my career by noting that the existing for-pay scientific publishing industry is a collection of hopelessly-obsolete parasitic middlemen that actively harms science education by keeping primary sources out of sight of the public, and that we should all lobby to have our government's tax-supported research grants come with a requirement to publish in open-access journals:

http://www.plos.org/

Some progress w/ this:

SEC. 218. The Director of the National Institutes of Health shall require that all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication: Provided, That the NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law. [1]

This is also prominently featured on the PubMed search page:

Does NIH fund your work? Then your manuscript must be made available in PubMed Central [2]

[1] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

Not much meat to that story...

"those who let their anger out in a constructive manner"

The article doesn't explain what this means but sounds like it's probably "don't lie down and take it when you encounter bullshit" which is of course "good for your career."

Showing that you care about your work gives people the impression that you care about your work; story at 11.

This seems to me like a good example of an interesting subject, edited into an overly-condensed article, and tagged with a catchy, but somewhat misleading title. I imagine it would be very difficult to control an experiment just on response to anger (as opposed to other emotions). Without seeing more detail, this article to me basically says that being self-aware and having a healthy understanding of the full range of one's natural emotions "is good for career." Doesn't seem particularly groundbreaking that anger would be included in that list.

It would be interesting to know what proportion of people are "constructively" letting out their anger. If everybody did it, would it still be an effective tactic? The standards of "professional behaviour" - especially in large organisations - tend to revolve around conflict avoidance, consensus and compromise. Is letting your anger out an abuse of that commons?

Of three options, each subsequent is better than the previous:

  1. Get angry and stay angry but don't show it. Conflict is not resolved.
  2. Get angry and vent it, thus resolving the conflict (possibly by parting ways)
  3. Don't get angry, but work on the problems.

Brought to you by the institute of common sense.

I prefer 2b: If you feel angry (real anger is not a choice), express it in a passionate but productive way, and stir others into action.

Anger can be powerful and useful when its righteous anger directed appropriately. Think about Jesus driving out money changers.

When it makes you a raving monster that hurls obscenities and nearby objects, well, that's not my style, but I've known big corp VPs that were like that.

Actually there was research on oil rigs team leaders published in Harvard Business Review which demonstrated that by selecting less aggressive team leaders (ones who were less macho but more likely to listen and try to understand) they were able to reduce accidents several times over and improve production. I can dig out the issue for you if you want to read it.

I claim that righteous anger only feels good, but is really inferior to constructive if non-sexy working through the issues.

Of course limits of the study applicability need to be scrutinized - what applies to people who are already members of one team may not apply to strangers and you may have to yell and stomp your feet :) at the latter to reach the desired effect.

How do you think Steve Ballmer got where he is today?

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