There is no Crying in Business?

Perception and expression of emotions is ubiquitous in the workplace, and organizational research has highlighted the importance of both expressing and perceiving emotions at work (Ashkanasy & Daus, 2002; Ashkanasy & Dorris, 2017) for areas such as employee commitment (Abraham, 1999), leadership, including emotional intelligence and emotion management (Kaplan et al., 2014), or negotiation settings (Van Kleef & Côté, 2018).

Emotional crying presents a strong emotional expression, which is considered a behavior unique to humans, that has significant impacts on how criers feel and are perceived by others (Vingerhoets, 2013). Although emotional crying presents a strong signal and the importance of emotions in the workplace has been highlighted repeatedly, there is surprisingly little, if any, research on crying in organizations.

Here, we provide an overview of the frequency of crying in the workplace, its triggers, and possible outcomes. We investigate these questions across a cross-sectional UK-based quota-sample and a daily diary crying study among German participants.

First, we find that by far the majority report having cried at least once at work and even more frequently observe colleagues crying. Crying is often triggered by work-related events such as feeling overwhelmed with a task or worrying about the future.

At the same time, attitudes towards crying at work are predominantly negative, and many individuals perceive it as a form of weakness and do not feel properly supported by their workplace in case they cried. We also find differences across individual, situational, and organizational variables.

Altogether, our findings shed some first light on instances of crying at work that are in opposition to predominant expressive norms at work. These studies highlight the fact that there is indeed crying in business, and it should be properly acknowledged to reduce its potential negative consequences.

Speaker: Prof. Janis H. Zickfeld, Assistant Professor at Department of Management and Centre for Integrative Business Psychology, Aarhus University, Denmark
Language: English
Registration: Not required
Host: IBT-HSG