Are Your Bad Co-Workers Killing You?
Nasty colleagues and bad-tempered bosses can certainly ruin your day and make you less productive at the office. But can dealing with jerks at work actually up your chances of premature death? It's a dramatic question, but bold researchers out of Israel decided to tackle it anyway.
The paper ran recently in Health Psychology and was reported on the blog of management guru and Stanford professor Bob Sutton. The study tracked 800 Israeli employees at a range of companies for two decades, measuring their health, their levels of mortality and the "peer social support" they experienced at work, which the researchers defined as high if "their immediate coworkers were helpful to them in solving problems, and were friendly to them."
What was the headline finding? Those workers who had little peer social support were 2.4 times more likely to die during the course of the study. That puts nasty office politics in a whole new light.
Sutton takes one look at this startling finding and comes up with a pretty straightforward takeaway. If you work with jerks, flee and flee fast:
These findings also reinforce that advice I have given again and again about the kind of workplaces it is best to seek versus avoid, and my related advice on surviving an asshole infested workplace. As I have always said, if you are surrounded by a bunch of assholes -- and people who won't help you solve work problems and who are unfriendly would qualify -- get out as fast as you can. This study suggests that, they longer you stay around such people, the more your health will suffer, and eventually, your risk of an early death will rise.He also notes that young workers may have less to fear from a nasty work environment as their generally better health can shield them from the negative effects of jerk-induced stress. Increased mortality was "driven mostly by the impact of support on workers who were 38 to 43," according to Sutton's summary. The exact reasons this age bracket appears most vulnerable were unclear (though experience says these are often the peak years of the work-family juggle for many as they tackle more senior roles and child-rearing simultaneously), but if you fall into this range, you might want to be more vigilant about the sorts of office environments you're subjecting yourself too.
Meanwhile, Wired's coverage of the same study noted another difference in how certain groups responded to an unfriendly workplace:
While men in unfriendly workplaces fared worse when they had little control, women actually seemed to fare better. In other words, their health status was improved when they had no say over their work day. One possibility cited by the researchers is that having a modicum of control at the office exacerbated the tensions between the office and home. Because many of the women were also mothers, having control left them with an extremely stressful series of choices. Should they stay late at work? Or go home and take care of the kids? This freedom, it turns out, compounded the stress of the unfriendly workplace. Control without support was even worse than having no control at all.Fascinating food for thought certainly, but both Sutton and Wired caution that this is still a relatively small sample size and the results should be taken with a grain of salt. So if your office is infested with jerks, don't rush off to hand in your resignation in fear of your life just yet. It might be time to polish up the old resume though.
Read More on BNET:
- Getting Along With the Office Jerk
- Hate Your Co-Worker? Here's How to Make the Best of It
- How to Train Yourself to Be Immune to Stress