When Venting to Managers Causes Problems

Key Takeaways:

• Some leaders who are the recipients of venting subsequently release the negative emotions by mistreating their subordinates
• Other leaders, who take into account details of what they are hearing, like merit and other content, neither experience those negative emotions nor mistreat others. This is an important distinction.
• Leaders need to be aware of the detrimental consequences of being the recipients of the venting and find ways to make good use of what they are learning.

Have you ever expressed and shared your negative feelings with your colleagues at work? Venting, which refers to an emotion-focused coping strategy where individuals discharge their negative feelings by expressing them to others, might offer benefits to individuals who vent to their workgroups.

It can not only result in the release of negative emotion experienced from a stressful event but also provide an opportunity for organizational members to be aware of potential issues at work, thereby serving as a catalyst for change.



However, consider a perspective of the other side: the recipient of venting. That is, will venting be also beneficial for those who lend an ear to it? In particular, one group that may be impacted by receipt of venting on a day-to-day basis is leaders.

Leaders have been described as nerve centers, or linking pins, who communicate information between lower and upper levels of the organizational hierarchy. Given the relational nature of their role in organizations, leaders are charged with listening to and interacting with a broad range of organizational members daily, thereby frequently being a target of the venting.

What will happen when leaders are the recipients of it?

To address this question, our research team asked 112 managers enrolled in a part-time executive MBA course, who were employed full-time in a variety of industries, to report back to us via online surveys on 10 consecutive workdays, and they gave us information on 790 incidents regarding their daily interactions with others at work.

The results of our study revealed the detrimental consequence of the venting: It triggers a negative spiral for the venting recipient, wherein leaders who are the recipients of venting may subsequently release negative emotions by mistreating their subordinates. That is, the experience of negative emotion stemming from leaders’ receipt of venting from others is followed by their engagement in interpersonal mistreatment.

Despite the harmful effect of being the recipients of the venting, the good news is that this is not the case for all leaders. We also found that leaders who consider the value of information neither experience negative emotion nor mistreat their subordinates after being the recipients of venting.

This is because leaders who focus more attention on the merits and content of information being conveyed are more willing to understand the frustrations and concerns being expressed to them by others. Thus, these leaders are less affected by the negative spiral when they are the recipients of the venting. Accordingly, they have a greater potential to make good use of the information conveyed in others’ vent to drive constructive changes in their workplace.

In conclusion, our research provides important messages to managers. Given that the emotion leaders experience after listening to colleagues’ vent makes them prone to mistreating others later in the day, we suggest that they may need to engage in emotion regulation and repair tactics aimed at improving their emotional state prior to or after interacting with other members of the organization.

Respite activities such as going for a walk or mindfulness exercises could be particularly helpful. Managers may also want to discourage employees from engaging in spontaneous venting and allow employees to schedule more formal, structured “gripe” sessions. Doing so would allow leaders to anticipate venting from others and plan accordingly so as to minimize the resulting disruption.