Dealing with Yelling and Not Yelling at Work

We've all been in an office setting where someone was getting chewed out. It may not have been us as the recipient but we heard the yelling and saw the employee fight back the tears as their boss laid it on to them thick after they messed up something big. You duck behind your cubicle and hope that you never have to deal with that wrath. But while yelling bosses like that happen once in a while in the workplace, they're much more prevalent on a television show or YouTube than they are in real life. As the Wall Street Journal explains:

Indeed, the yelling boss appears to be quietly disappearing from the workplace. The new consensus among managers is that yelling alarms people, drives them away rather than inspiring them, and hurts the quality of their work. Some bosses also fear triggering a harassment lawsuit or winding up as the star of a co-worker's cellphone videotape gone viral. While underlings may work hard for difficult bosses, hoping for a shred of praise, few employees do their best work amid yelling. 

Verbal aggression tends to impair victims' working memory, reducing their ability to understand instructions and perform such basic tasks as operating a computer, according to several studies of cellphone-company employees and engineering students published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

But the article doesn't stop there--it goes on to say that while actual yelling doesn't go on as often, what's taken its place when all that aggression is swept under the rug may actually be worse:

Managers spend about 25% of their time resolving conflicts, research shows. The "not-so-good part" of the no-yelling trend "is that people are pushing things under the carpet," causing frustrations to seep out in other ways, says Jack Lampl, president of the A.K. Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems in Rainier, Wash. One favorite way of venting, angry email, "serves as a relief valve, but tends to inflame conflict. It takes a very corrosive role in the workplace, for gossiping and undermining others," he says. 

The way to solve all this behavior, according to The Journal is to have some sort of mediated discussion and air your grievances (in a better way than Festivus, hopefully). Hopefully this allows the two parties to come to a civil understanding which can serve better than angry e-mails, stone-cold stares and that embarrassing yelling that left me cowering in a cubicle years ago.