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They made the workplace so nice that we're all angry
We have become so used to laughing at psychobabble, or at least I hope we have, that the phrase anger management training can usually be relied on to raise a titter. The news on Thursday that a school in north London is offering anger management classes for six-year-olds must have provoked a full-throttle guffaw in anyone who spotted it.
It is very cheering to find something funny at breakfast time, so I was rather enjoying the story of how children even as young as three are taking part in an anger resolution and conflict management scheme at St Ann's Church of England primary school in Tottenham.
It seems patrols of children -some of them only six -wearing badges and red caps marked "Mentor", are learning how to stop bullying. They have weekly role play sessions, including anger management and conflict resolution training. They are taught ways of helping other children walk away from arguments and fights, and control their anger with breathing techniques.
When anyone gets hot-headed in the playground, their little mentors can help them stop, think and listen and deal with their anger. There is even a "friendship stop" in the playground, a bench where mentors give childish advice to angry and unhappy little girls and boys.
This sounded perfectly absurd at first. Role play is yet another of those maddening phrases that immediately makes one think of Ricky Gervais and The Office. But slowly I began to believe that this scheme is perhaps not such a silly idea.
Pupils from this poor inner-city area are now doing very well. Their behaviour has improved greatly since the scheme was introduced, and has been praised by Ofsted, and their academic performance is well above the national average. This year 93% of the 11-year-olds reached the government's expected level for science, 89% for English and 78% for maths. Yet, as the head teacher explained, the school is in a deprived and violent area and many children lack good role models at home.
Perhaps it is time to readjust some prejudices. I had always assumed that while there is a great deal of anger management training about these days, it is largely to make work for people in personnel, or rather human resources, with not enough to do. Perhaps that is wrong.
On Thursday last week, at the British Psychological Society's occupational psychology conference, Jill Booth presented a small research study arguing that UK workplaces are hotbeds of anger. She said she was shocked at the levels of anger she discovered among the workers she interviewed, including tears of rage and frustration. She feels anger is generally much more common in the workplace than it used to be.
In the United States, according to some of the plethora of websites devoted to anger, rage is almost epidemic. It is impossible to know, in the furious onslaught of information, what to believe, but a Gallup poll in 2002 found that two out of 10 employees feel angry enough to actually want to hurt someone at work.
I confess I have known the feeling. Perhaps Americans are more enraged than us for some reason, but in any case, where they lead we tend sooner or later to follow.
Meanwhile, I find it very difficult to understand why people are so newly furious, if indeed they are. Has something changed? Booth's study found that the main reason for anger at work was "immoral behaviour" such as cheating, lying, stealing or skiving, or unfairness such as exploitation or unjust criticism.
Other causes of anger were incompetence, rudeness, disrespect and bad communication. But these things have always been with us, and were far worse in the past. Employers were much more powerful and cruel. As described by Dickens in A Christmas Carol Bob Cratchit's conditions of employment were infinitely worse than those of today's worker, who is protected by human rights legislation.
Working conditions these days are hugely more pleasant and relaxed even than when I first got a job in the late 20th century, not so very long ago. It was absolutely normal then for a woman to be patronised, insulted and even goosed by men, without redress, and managers were allowed to say things to anyone that would be unspeakable today.
Incompetence and "immorality" were just as common too, I am sure, and exploitation and the feeling of powerlessness were very much worse. Since working conditions have improved so radically, you might logically expect less anger, not more.
What's changed, I suspect, is that people feel newly free to express anger. They feel more able to acknowledge their fury to themselves, as they are not only more able, but everywhere encouraged to admit any and all of their feelings to themselves. Then we have all been encouraged, in the recent feminisation of culture, to express our feelings to others. Sometimes we are compelled to do so.
What's more, we're encouraged to be believe our health depends on it too. Every magazine, every television channel, every film preaches the therapeutic necessity of expressing one's feelings, even those, like anger, that used to be considered deadly sins. Wrath, lust, sloth -tell it like it is.
The result of discussing and rehearsing and reliving something, however, may well be to overemphasise it, and even to exaggerate it and strengthen it. Some therapists are beginning to acknowledge this. And there is some evidence that watching violent videos and games, as almost all children now do, encourages aggression.
Another change has been the decline of patience, traditionally seen as the virtue corresponding to the cardinal sin of anger. Older generations were much more patient. A Gallup poll in America in 1996 found that 18 to 34-year-olds were more than four times more likely to report feeling angry at work than workers of 50 or more.
One could argue that the older workers suffered just as badly from anger, but merely repressed it. Alternatively, one could suggest that as the older people grew up less used to instant gratification, with fewer unrealistic expectations than young people today of autonomy, empowerment and an inalienable human right to creative satisfaction, they genuinely felt less frustrated and angry.
There has been one change in working life which might, perhaps, account for genuinely higher levels of frustration and anger, and that is the enormous increase in regulation and paperwork in all sectors as a result of human rights and health and safety laws.
Booth agreed that one of the causes of anger she had found among employees, though not at the top of their lists, was the powerlessness they feel when frustrated in doing the real work they imagined they would be doing because of the burden of paperwork, particularly among the health and education workers in her study.
There is a neat little irony in the thought that legislation intended to empower and protect people may serve, in the end, to disempower them and threaten their self-esteem, not to mention their efficiency and their arteries.
Actually, it makes me feel angry.
The Sunday Times | Sunday, January 11, 2004
