A sturdy by Texas A&M university finds that people who are anger perform better on a set of challenging tasks than those who are emotionally neutral. ( Guardian 31/10/23 ) So would an Angry Manager be more effective?
In most HR articles the focus is on how to deal with an angry boss. Because an angry boss is a bad boss. I suppose most people would think an angry boss is one who shouts and swears at their staff, slams doors , throws things, gets thats wild look in their eyes and is very scary when they lose it.
But shouldn’t a good manager care and if you care then you are are going to experience disappointment, frustration and annoyance when things happen that shouldn’t happen, when people let you down, let the service down, let themselves down. For example you’re a manager of a group of residential care homes and it comes to light that some staff have been systematically cruel to those vulnerable individuals they were employed to care for. Isn’t anger the right response?
Would it not be right to get angry on discovering a new young member of the team had been subjected to racial abuse from colleagues? What about a member of staff who is rude and unhelpful to a valued customer( or any customer)? So is the problem not getting angry but how the manager expresses their angry or in the case of this research how they channel that strength of feeling.
As a former senior manager who recruited manager in social services I don’t want managers who don’t care. I don’t want managers who are ,” emotionally neutral” in the face of abuse or a failure of services. I think a social service Director should get angry very angry that a frail elderly person has been left for hours in a cold urine soaked bed because the home care service was short staffed.
I don’t want bad tempered managers who abuses their employees but give me someone who cares enough to get angry over someone who is emotionally neutral every time.
