How to Deal With the Office Jerk
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Here's your Monday briefing for Monday, June 26th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Returning to the office has meant a return to working with a patchwork of personalities, including the office jerk. Sure, the disruptions can be annoying, but they can also impact their co-workers' careers.
When we encounter jerks, it's death by a thousand paper cuts. Eventually, we disengage from the workplace. We have revolving doors of talent. The accumulation of the stress in your body as well is also something we shouldn't underestimate. When you're experiencing these chronic stressors from jerks, eventually you're going to see consequences like poor sleep.
We'll talk to New York University psychology professor Tessa West about a recent study that highlighted the anxiety some people feel when giving feedback. After the break.
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What problem does this episode introduce about 'office jerks' and returning to the office?
Are you the office jerk? You might think, of course not. But what if your co-workers disagree? Turns out they may be reluctant to tell you how they really feel. Tessa West is a professor of psychology at New York University. She and her colleagues conducted a study to find out why people find it difficult to give negative feedback. And she joins me now. So Tessa, what kind of jerk-like behavior are we talking about?
When most of us hear the word jerk, we think really egregious stuff, you know, yelling at someone, insulting them, taking away their power in a meeting. But I actually really focus on the low-level types of jerk behavior, interruptions, you know, kind of ignoring people, writing a slightly rude email, or taking over a meeting, the kinds of things that we encounter in our everyday work lives.
So why did you decide to do the study?
I think it's fascinating to look at how people avoid feedback in uncomfortable situations. As a social psychologist, that's really what I focus on is how people avoid feeling anxious and uncomfortable, even if it kind of hurts them in the end. So one of the studies we talk about in this piece is really focusing on giving feedback to someone who obviously needs it in the context of losing a negotiation to that person in all the ways that which people will just avoid saying the thing instead of just being straightforward and honest in a way that's useful to the person on the receiving end.
Why do they try to avoid giving feedback?
I think we live in a culture where negative feedback is just seen as really inappropriate. And probably more importantly, we don't learn how to do it in a constructive way. So we're very afraid of it. We're afraid it's going to backfire, that the person's going to do things like engage in reverse blame. Well, maybe if you had done this better, I wouldn't be in this situation. And I think that's typically how these things play out. And so instead of learning the strategies to be better at it, we just avoid it completely.
So how did you work this feedback issue into the study that you and your colleagues did?
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