Is it ever acceptable to cry at work?
New study finds co-workers still frown on women tearing up
Script violation.
The phrase is new to my lexicon, but when you start reading about women and crying at work and the angst layered into whether it’s appropriate for women to cry at work, you might just fall upon this language, as I did.
The precipitating moment was a recent interview with a woman executive reflecting on a board meeting during which she teared up — so not done — and my own recollection of being advised that an early weepy moment could compromise my future career. The message: don’t do that again. This was a puzzle. It was okay, on the evidence, to be rude or lecherous or a bully in the workplace (I include my own occasional behaviour in the “rude” category), but as soon as the tears fall from a woman’s eyes, then whammo. Say goodbye to being taken seriously. Seriously? Well that depends. In a paper published in June by the Academy of Management, Beth Bechky and Kimberly Elsbach, both business school professors, note that while there has been research into the situational causes for crying at work and the underlying drivers (psychological, emotional), there has been relatively little examination into the context and consequences of women crying at work.
“In particular,” the authors observe, “we know little about how observers perceive professional women who cry at work, and even less about how the work context influences those perceptions.”
What are the effects of female crying when it comes time for, say, performance evaluations or one’s ultimate career trajectory? In this, the empirical research has been absent. And yet the effects of the crying behaviour could have serious career consequences.
It’s complex. Those emotional drivers? As observers, we are quite lousy at assessing the emotional backstory in others. The authors cite dispiriting research demonstrating that even during what they define as unambiguous displays of sadness, 24 per cent of observers in one particular study picked “afraid” as the underlying cause of the tears. A further 15 per cent went for “disgust” and “anger” and other unnamed descriptors. Sixty-one per cent of respondents picked “sadness.”
“Because the underlying emotions associated with crying are often ambiguous,” the authors tell us, “the underlying meaning of crying, in terms of what it says about the situation and the crier is also often ambiguous. As a result, we argue that determining the meaning of female crying at work may rely on assessment information other than the crier’s underlying emotions.”
You will not be surprised to learn that laboratory studies demonstrate that we are A-OK when it comes to adults crying in non-work settings, especially in the obvious ones: funerals, weddings. The authors don’t cite airports, but airports are great for crying.
Nor is it surprising that some emotions expressed in the workplace grade better for men than women. Anger, by example. It has been demonstrated that male professional leaders who express anger are more positively perceived than female professionals who express anger. Yet this emotion does not carry the same negative connotation that crying does.
Or rather, can. When former U.S. president Barack Obama cried in his gun control speech as he reflected on the slaughtered children of Sandy Hook Elementary School, he was praised for putting his emotions on display — and harshly criticized in other quarters for being weak, an embarrassment, even actorly.
For their study, Elsbach and Bechky interviewed 65 fulltime professionals who had observed crying at work but had not cried at work themselves. In analyzing 100 “crying events,” certain themes emerged, including crying triggers (critical feedback, by example), types of crying (tearing up? bawling one’s eyes out?) and the observer’s behavioural responses (assessing the crier as “weak” would be one example here).
The ambiguity of the crying events came through in the research. Of the 100 crying events, the underlying emotion of the crier was clearly identified in only seven.
Some distinctions emerged. Crying during critical feedback was allowed “as long as employees did not let crying prevent feedback from getting through to them and as long as the crying did not continue in public following the performance evaluation.” (Any subsequent carry-on crying behaviour was deemed “prohibited” by observers.)
Crying during “heated meetings” was almost always taken as a sign of a lack of professionalism, and thus also deemed prohibitive behaviour.
The authors conclude that the workplace performs to cognitive scripts when evaluating women who cry on site. The worker who cries in that heated meeting is assigned “dispositional” attributes by observers — that is, she is seen as weak or unprofessional. The authors call this “script violation,” the crier having gone off script in what is deemed acceptable behaviour. “Script confirmation,” on the other hand, occurs when observers accept that the crier has experienced a tough go at work. And so these “situational” attributes draw a more forgiving audience.
I have failed to capture the nuances involved in this script writing — does the crying occur in a private setting? Did it happen once or weekly? Five minutes or half an hour? You can’t read through this and conclude comprehensively what the rules of corporate engagement are meant to be.
Crying in front of strangers is deemed a clear script violation. So there’s one hard and fast rule. As one observer phrased it: “don’t cry in front of anybody unless it’s somebody that you know and trust.”
Continuing to cry after re- ceiving a critical performance evaluation labels the worker as overly emotional.
It is dispiriting and not surprising to read that even an observer sympathetic to a crying colleague can nevertheless make negative assumptions about the colleague’s professionalism.
One might conclude that this is all fodder for a more enlightened approach to management.
But no. The authors land all the responsibility for what they call the “management of emotional displays in professional work contexts” onto the shoulders of the crier. What should a woman do? Tip one: stop crying “and/or leave the company of others while crying.” Tip two: “apologize later for crying to those who witnessed it.” Tip three: keep the crying to a minimum — don’t allow it to detract from the work.
“In general, if you are a woman who cries at work, paying attention to the context and the emotions of observers could save your career,” the authors conclude.
And here I thought all this research would lead to progress. Apologize for crying? Never.
The authors put all the responsibility onto the shoulders of the crier