Research shows men who suppress workplace anger are more likely to die early

First, Bloomberg's Business Week ran an article and then last week Wall Street Journal blogger Sue Shellenbarger pondered whether it's "ever a good idea to get openly angry at work" (The Pros and Cons of Venting at Work).

The research, which was originally published in a recent issue of the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, was led by Constanze Leineweber, a specialist in the field of work environments, health and stress.

The research shows that workers who use “covert coping” – that is, refraining from confronting a co-worker who treats you unfairly, and ignoring the situation – were far more likely to have heart attacks or die from heart disease.

Business Week quoted Leineweber as saying: "It’s better to say that you feel unfairly treated," implying that it was better rather to act instead of bottling up your anger.

In response, Sue Shellenbarger writing in the Wall Street Journal's The Juggle, suggested that responding angrily to frustrations at work could damage your career or important work relationships, and advocated a more subtle path of "'sublimation' – re-directing the energy generated by your anger into some positive pursuit."

Constanze Leineweber was interested to hear the team's research had been picked up in the USA, but was rather vexed by the way it has been reported.

"There's been so much emphasis on 'Shout at your boss' in the press instead of reporting what we found," Leineweber says. "It seems some journalists have misunderstood what we were saying. We found a correlation between men who were experiencing conflict in the workplace and heart disease. At no point whatsoever have I advocated that people vent their anger at work. There's no evidence to suggest this helps."

Leineweber and her colleagues looked at 2,755 male participants in a Stockholm workplace study. Their average age was 41, and none had previously suffered a heart attack. The men took part in the study between 1992 and 1995. By 2003, a review of Swedish national records revealed that 47 had either suffered a heart attack or died from heart disease.

When Leineweber and her team looked at the two strategies that reflected immediate response to such incidents – "walking away" during the encounter or not saying anything –they found that the men who said they often used these covert coping strategies were more likely to suffer a heart attack or heart-related death, even after factors like age, high blood pressure, work-related demands, and level of autonomy on the job were taken into consideration.

Related links:

www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_49/c4158management722415.htm

blogs.wsj.com/juggle/2010/01/21/anger-management-the-pros-and-cons-of-venting-at-work/

Text: Jon Buscall