Tension in the workplace is common. Everyone wants to be as productive as possible to improve their respective careers. This often creates a conflict of interest since a person wants to be on top over some employees – a fact that will not be received well by other employees who also wanted to improve in their career.

Aside from workplace competition, family problems, conflicting personalities and pressure from upper management could take its toll on employees. These factors could easily lead to frustration, stress and ultimately anger. Physical contact caused by anger could easily happen in the workplace if they are not prevented.

Managers and supervisors have a big role in controlling anger and other forms of negative emotions on employees. As the leader, they have to take charge of every business aspect and everything that might affect the business process – including workplace turmoil among employees. When conflict escalates into anger in the workplace, the manager has to do all he can to prevent further damages in the workplace.

Financial Aspect of Anger

Aside from creating a friendly atmosphere in the workplace, a good reason for managers to control and prevent anger from employees is money. When conflicts escalate in the office, productivity goes down which means less profits for the company. Although healthy competition could rise, conflicting parties would only think of damaging the other party instead of improving their numbers.

It could even get worst when conflict and anger escalates to physical contact among employees. When an employee assaults another employee, the repercussions go beyond simple tension and productivity – someone will be sued, compensation will be provided to those assaulted and anger management program will be implemented on some of the employees. All these happen with corresponding financial responsibility on the part of the company.

Knowing through External Actions

While it is true that work pressure and colleagues could have a major impact on anger issues on the individual, it could be possible that the reason for uncontrollable rage on some employees could come from home. This could be difficult for the managers to know since a proper business relationship has to be established.

For that reason, managers have to aid their employees’ anger issues based on their external actions. These actions will give managers an idea on how to deal with the situation and see how deep violence could affect work.

The assistance offered by managers is aimed to prevent any violent actions escalating at work. When violence happens, it could be said that the managers failed to prevent this type of events from happening because the problem was not addressed as soon as it has started to come out. The external actions are already there so the manager would have noticed these and could have addressed them as soon as possible.

Strategies for Managers

The reason why managers could be blamed for preventing such actions is that they are in a perfect position to implement strategies to prevent workplace violence and anger related problems.

There are, in fact, specific strategies for managers to control and prevent anger in workplace. We can place these strategies into two types: the mild and strong strategies.

Mild strategy is all about seeking assistance as well as extending emotional help to the employees. Managers can ask company psychologist, psychiatrist and the HR department for evaluation and emotional assistance to their employees.

Aside from outside help, managers could also control anger in their employees by implementing “assertive communication” wherein the manager expresses his or her feelings about the situation sternly with a fair reason why these feelings are triggered.

Strong strategies are actual managerial actions that will control any confusion in the workplace and prevent rage. There are two things that a manager could do in this strategy. First is to specify the limitation for each employee.

For example, each employee should provide an actual timeframe for the assignment so that the other employee would have fair expectations on how the project would be delivered. This expectation will be complemented by the second act a manager would do: penalization with a stern warning.

A manager might run into employees that are not enthusiastic about the rules and expectations. This could create problems when they are not addressed as soon as possible. If they do not follow after a warning, penalization should be implemented.