To Maximize Performance Stop The ‘Blame Game’. & Focus On Goals.

Instead of using recrimination and blame, managers need to train their employees to effectively cope with negative work events — such as a sales loss — if they want workers to stay on track toward achieving their goals. A new Rice University study indicates that individuals who stay focused after a work-related loss are better performers than employees who vent their negative feelings or try to repress them.

When people in sales positions lose a major sale, it’s not uncommon for them to feel disappointed or even angry and frustrated by their customer’s decision. How well they perform in their jobs afterwards, can very much depend on their coping strategies, according to a new study by university researchers.

“Because effective coping may help improve individual and organizational performance, managers would be wise to include emotional management in their employees’ training programs,” says Robert A. Westbrook, an expert on the psychology, measurement and modeling of customer satisfaction with Rice’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management.

In one of the first studies on coping in an actual work setting, Westbrook and his colleagues confirmed that without effective coping skills, individuals’ negative emotions following a critical negative work event such as the loss of a major sale do affect their performance.

“As these emotional episodes and their effects accumulate over time, the ability to cope effectively may account for substantial differences between individuals’ long-term performances,” Westbrook says.

In an article in the Journal of Applied Psychology, titled “Good Cope, Bad Cope: Adaptive and Maladaptive Coping Strategies Following a Critical Negative Work Event,” Westbrook and his co-authors Steven P. Brown at the University of Houston and Goutam Challagalla from the Georgia Institute of Technology identify a variety of coping strategies, some of which buffer the impact of negative emotions on an individual’s performance and others that appear to adversely affect his or her ability to focus on the job.

When workers dwell on a negative event and vent their negative feelings, the researchers found that they tend to aggravate the adverse effects of their negative emotions on their performance. The more they vent, the stronger the adverse effect on their ability to do their job.

On the other hand, workers who exercise strong self-control and refrain from expressing or acting out their negative emotions do significantly temper their negative feelings, but their performance suffers in the process.

“Self control is certainly effective in getting rid of the immediate negative feelings,” Westbrook says. ” But when individuals use all their energy to control their negative emotions rather than re-focusing on the job, their performance doesn’t improve.”

The study found the most effective means of coping in terms of job performance is to stay focused on the task. While this strategy did not appear to have any effect on workers’ negative emotions, individuals who were more focused on their goals tended to be better performers.

“The best alternative to venting or mulling over circumstances surrounding a negative work event is to concentrate on the next step and stay on track toward achieving the goal,” Westbrook says.

As relevant as these findings are to a wide range of work situations, most sales training focuses on selling techniques and product knowledge, but doesn’t address the issue of how to cope when a negative event occurs on the job. Westbrook and his colleagues believe that the content of these training programs ought to be broadened to include emotional management.

The study also has implications for company recruiters and for managers themselves. Westbrook suggests, for example, that during the hiring process, companies are looking for people who have the ability to manage their emotions. At the same time, managers need to coach their employees in coping strategies.

“Managers need to help guide their employees to learn from their experiences and get on with their work,” Westbrook says. “Unfortunately, the more common response is recrimination and blame.”

To confirm that their different dimensions of coping captured the fundamental aspects of a sale person’s lost sale and emotional reaction, the researchers conducted in-depth interviews with a group of salespeople employed by an industrial packaging firm.

The researchers then conducted a mail survey in which they asked the national sales forces of two different firms to describe the circumstances of a recent sales lose in detail. They measured the workers’ negative emotions using an adaptation of Izard’s 1991 DES III scale and identified their coping tactics from a version of Folkman and Lazarus’s Ways of Coping Questionnaire.

The researchers also queried the managers about each individual sales person’s performance based on the sales volume they generated. They compared the workers’ feedback about their emotions and coping with the supervisors’ assessment of their performances to see how they were statistically related.

“Our study focused on one type of critical negative work event in an industrial selling context,” Westbrook says.

“It would be particularly worthwhile to analyze the effects of critical work events on long-term trends in individuals’ work behavior, performance and how coping helps shape these trends.”

Westbrook holds the university’s William Alexander Kirkland Professorship of Management and teaches marketing management at the graduate level. Prior to his academic career, he served as a senior staff member of prominent marketing research and political opinion polling organizations. His work on customer satisfaction and customer-driven organizational change has been widely published in such scholarly journals as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Consumer Research, the Journal of Applied Psychology and Sloan Marketing Review.
Westbrook received his academic training at the University of Michigan where he completed his undergraduate degree in honors psychology, summa cum laude, and his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in business administration.

For more information at http://www.rice.edu