Why it is possible and sometimes necessary to come to work in a gloomy mood

Progressive employers often assume that a productive, successful team is an office full of positive, smiling people. However, the researchers concluded that making employees look more cheerful and cheerful than they actually feel 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.

Tyranny of Work Productivity

The craze for a positive work attitude was recently influenced by research on Why happy employees are 12% more productive / Fast Company. about the connection between the productivity of employees and their good mood. It would seem that efforts to increase employee satisfaction should benefit both the employees themselves and the management. However, corporate happiness strategies lead to undesirable results rather quickly.

Depending on where you work, trying to boost your morale can look different, ranging from Friday pizza to telling the staff cafeteria to feign joy from early morning until late at night. In the long term, such superficial manipulative techniques will do nothing, as they will quickly become familiar and no longer impress. Sometimes even really good intentions - such as being able to work from home - can weaken the boundaries between work and private life. This is dangerous because the unspoken ban on personal emotions will spread to all areas of life.

The right balance can be struck when an employer strives to create a warm work environment and at the same time realizes that employees have a life outside of work that inevitably affects their mood. Don't put everything on the altar of productivity and lose respect for employees' privacy.

The need to portray joy over long periods of time is fraught with physical and mental health problems, ranging from depression to cardiovascular disease.

You cannot become happier by constantly suppressing negative emotions.

Researchers concluded For a better workday, smile like you mean it / MSUToday / Michigan State University. that a forced smile on duty spoils the mood of its owner and may even lead to the fact that a person wants to quit his job. It has also been observed that women find it harder to suppress negative emotions than men.

About the benefits of the gloomy ones

While being positive increases productivity, irritability and skepticism also have many benefits.

Discontent is a mild 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 better distinguish between strong and weak arguments than a neutral person. This is due to the fact that irritation triggers the mechanisms of analytical information processing.

A slight despondency sometimes makes us neater and more attentive to details. Mood decline stimulates critical thinking and communication skills.

Anger can serve as an impetus for the 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 outburst of creativity triggered by anger does not always last. Anger is a very exhausting emotion. Therefore, angry people are able to generate interesting ideas quickly, but not for long.

Girl, smile

Alas, gender inequality extends to the right to express one's own emotions. We often see gloomy men in high positions. But women have to balance on the edge of a knife. On the one hand, few people want to entrust responsible work to an overly emotional lady. For example, a group of researchers at the Technical University of Munich Key to promotion for women: don’t smile / The Telegraph. found that women who exude an excessive cheerfulness are less likely to get high positions. On the other hand, an aggressive, impenetrable career woman is also unlikely to enjoy success with the team, bosses and business partners.

Overt ambition and refusal to be “nice to talk to” is a luxury few working women can afford.

Women who suppress their true emotions often feel unhappy. This is especially true for female service and customer support workers.

The effort that women in these areas are forced to spend on controlling their own emotions in order to create the right mood in others is called emotional labor. By and large, this means double work: they not only perform their duties technically, but also exploit their femininity.

The burden of emotional labor lies primarily with the working class. It is easier for highly skilled female employees to win the right to be morose than it is for women in the service sector.

The positive game is not worth the candle

All employees (especially women) benefit when their emotional state is not dictated by management and when they are not manipulated for the benefit of the company.

No matter how hard the leaders go to put the team in a positive mood, in the long run it will not make anyone work faster or better. A gloomy professional is in no way inferior to a cheerful professional, and he is certainly more valuable than a satisfied amateur.