ONE OUT OF FIVE AMERICANS HAS AN ANGER MANAGEMENT PROBLEM

ONE OUT OF FIVE AMERICANS HAS AN ANGER MANAGEMENT PROBLEM

Anger is a natural human emotion and is nature's way of empowering us to “ward off” our perception of an attack or threat to our well being. The problem is not anger, the problem is the mismanagement of anger. Mismanaged anger is the major cause of conflict in our personal and professional relationships.

Management and Coping with Anger in the Workplace

Violence and destructive anger has reached an epidemic level in our culture and negatively impacts us in each arena and major tasks of life.

In a recent Gallup poll, two (2) out of every ten (10) employees confessed to being angry enough to “hurt” some co-worker in the last six (6) months.

Much of the problem contributing to the epidemic anger and violence occurring in the workplace is that many people have attitudes about themselves, about others and about life that predispose them to behave in ways that are irrational and disrespecting towards others. Such persons are “culturally incompetent” and are not “sensitive” to other peoples “feelings” [or] ways of seeing, doing and understanding things. And when conflicts arise, their lack of “insight” and cultural competence makes positive cooperation difficult and sometimes, even impossible.

Most of the inter-employee problems, manager/employee problems and violent conflicts on the job, arise out of this negative context of cultural ignorance.

When co-workers, managers and employees learn how to make the transition from their mistaken or uninformed attitudes and expectations of others to more appropriate ones, their lives at work take on new meaning and purpose. As employees, they become more efficient and productive at their job. They stop insulting and putting each other down and start helping each other up. They are moved into a relationship of mutual respect.

Mutual respect can be defined as state in which two (or more) individuals respect themselves and each other in spite of their differences, faults and imperfections.

In the context of mutual respect, each employee's feelings of self respect and sense of worth and value are enhanced. Even when the person make it very difficult for us to respect them by making useless “anger mischief” we can still disengage from their inappropriate or unprofessional behavior and respect them in spite of it!