Receiving positive acknowledgment and being appreciated by colleagues can help employees deal with negative experiences at work.
A study by University of East Anglia (UEA) has found that employees often experience ‘embitterment’ – an emotional response to perceived workplace injustice – on days when they are assigned tasks they deem unreasonable or unnecessary.
The study highlights the “dynamic nature of embitterment” and suggests that unnecessary and unreasonable tasks are potential predictors of the emotion, which in turn can interfere with employees’ ability to recover from work during their time off. The study also shows that embitterment not only affects employee performance and work, but can also spill over into their personal lives – leading to a negative effect on their wellbeing.
Unreasonable tasks are often those employees consider to exceed their role, capabilities, or responsibilities – such as asking a senior employee to perform a novice’s work – generating a sense of injustice because they might violate expectations of fairness and respect in the workplace.
Published in the journal Work & Stress, the study involved researchers from UEA, the University of Cyprus and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Greece.
Co-author of the study, George Michaelides, Professor of Work Psychology at UEA’s Norwich Business School, said:
“Our findings underscore how assigning unreasonable tasks can violate employees’ sense of fairness and harm their emotional wellbeing. It also emphasises the crucial role of supervisors in minimising such tasks and prioritising core responsibilities. Additionally, fostering a culture of appreciation among colleagues can serve as a protective factor, helping employees cope with workplace stress. Organisations can support this by equipping employees with the skills to express gratitude effectively, creating a more positive and resilient work environment.”
The study’s lead author, Dr Evie Michailidis, from the University of Cyprus, added: “The importance of appreciation for mitigating feelings of embitterment cannot be overstated. Without appreciation, unreasonable tasks foster feelings of embitterment that spill over into private lives, making it harder to mentally disconnect and recover after work.”
The team collected data from 71 employees using daily surveys over five working days. These surveys helped the researchers track individual’s feelings of embitterment, the degree to which they had to engage with illegitimate tasks, how much appreciation they felt from their colleagues and supervisors, and how much they thought about work during their time off.
