A lost client, crashing computer, a boss's sharp rebuke, or a bad news phone call from home, and pow - you begin to lose it at work. The tears start to well up. It's not a good day.
But is crying a black mark on your office reputation, even a career-killer? Perhaps we'll never know if Hillary Clinton won over or turned off voters when she teared up on the New Hampshire campaign trail last month, but the much-publicized moment obviously didn't sink her then. She won that primary, after all.
Tears are like that in the office. Ambiguous, emotional, wet, and discomfiting, tears tend to lead to the kind of grapevine "publicity" that no one likes, even though they can have a happy ending. Tears are a complicated and sometimes dangerous addition to the game.
Carynne Corvaia, a marketing manager in Lowell, has seen all kinds during a career that's taken her from high-tech to healthcare and now tourism, and she's shed one or two herself at the office.
"There's being silent at your desk when a tear rolls down your face, and there's sniffling and ignoring your own tears, then there's acting out your crying," says Corvaia, marketing director for the Greater Merrimack Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau. On one occasion when she teared up in front of a boss, the uncomfortable moment led to a new mutual understanding.
"I was having a difficult time with that boss, and finally I found the words, and the boss got it," says Corvaia. "When she got it, she teared up, because she was kind of embarrassed, she realized I wasn't undermining her."
Notice that we've been talking about "tearing up," not sobbing or wailing. A first lesson from a Handbook of Office Crying might read: less is more. Studies show that most of the time, tearing up is viewed more positively than overt crying.
"Good tears are tears under control - the moist eye, the almost-tears that show that a person feels very deeply, but still is under control of her or his emotion," says Stephanie Shields, a psychology and women's studies professor at Pennsylvania State University who has done research on people's perception of public crying.
However, a teary man is viewed more positively than a choked-up woman, something that Shields' lab calls the "Mr. Sensitive Advantage" and that male politicians from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney seem to know well.
Reagan was a consummate moist-eye man, and Romney has teared up more than once on the campaign trail, including during an appearance on "Meet the Press." This double standard may arise because women report being more prone to cry than men, and so others may see their moist eyes as signaling a potential loss of control. Men say they avoid crying because it is seen as weak, studies show.
"There's this huge stereotype of the overly emotional women," says Leah Warner, a co-researcher of Shields and a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Oberlin College in Ohio. "When men do express emotion, people believe they do it for important reasons."
Kelley Kassa remembers a young account executive at a large public relations firm in Boston whose regular crying jags helped derail her future at the agency. "The crying girl" lost it "anytime you gave her direction, and I'm not talking about hard, 'you really screwed up' direction," says Kassa, who now directs communications for the Toronto-based software firm Varicent from her Watertown home office.
"If you're crying over 'I have too much work,' or 'this project sucks,' or 'I hate my boss,' then it calls into question your stability, maturity, or right fit for the job," says Kassa, who has developed her own tear-curbing strategies, such as keeping her head down when she's feeling under the weather or short-fused.
It's true that what you cry about also makes a difference. If you sniffle at your desk about a sad twist of fate, i.e. your mom has cancer, most colleagues are sympathetic, says Kimberly Elsbach, a tenured professor at the University of California/Davis' graduate school of management, who is researching the consequences of crying at work for women managers.
But angry or even sad tears directed at workmates can have serious repercussions for women in some hard-driving, male-dominated industries, Elsbach's preliminary research shows. Some women interviewed by Elsbach report losing promised promotions or even getting fired for crying, she says. How did Elsbach get interested in this topic? "I'm a crier myself," she says, and while tears are a fact of life in many workplaces, she was surprised to find almost no research exists on the fallout from crying on the job.
"The best case is that people aren't going to listen to you as you cry, and the worst case is that they'll never listen to you as leadership material," says Elsbach. "It's almost discrimination. You're knocking someone out of contention to be a more productive member of the organization because they're expressing an emotion in a way that makes us feel uncomfortable."
Is it discrimination, and will our terror of the "office cry" begin to ease in a world that's becoming more managed by women? Will crying rooms join breastfeeding rooms as a hot corporate perk? Or maybe we'll just save our tears for the days we telecommute. For better or worse, it's hard to imagine most organizations taking the lid off workplace tears.
Maggie Jackson, author of What's Happening to Home: Balancing Work, Life and Refuge in the Information Age, can be reached at maggie.jackson@att.net.
