Have a sarcastic colleague at your workplace? Take heart, as he/she may be helping (though unknowingly) to bring the best out in you
Have a sarcastic colleague at your workplace? Take heart, as he/she may be helping (though unknowingly) to bring the best out in you.
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A new study has found that employees who have to put up with a sarcastic colleague or boss are more creative than those who don't, reports the Daily Mail.
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An earful of barb every day makes you work harder and smarter than if your office was a more caring environment.
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The inherent humour in the comments also defused the tension that comes with anger.
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The study by researchers from the Bar-Ilan University in Israel asked 375 engineering students to imagine they were a customer service representative dealing with phone calls.
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They were played three conversations between another customer service agent and a caller in which he was either angry, normal or sarcastic.
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Those who had heard the angry conversation performed better than the neutral one when asked to perform a simple creative task.
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But even more surprising was that after hearing the sarcastic calleru00a0-- who used phrases like 'your service is as fast as a turtle' - they did even better still.
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The researchers speculated that anger causes people to adopt a narrow focus on one's immediate concerns to avoid further suffering.
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The sarcasm had a better effect because it involved higher-level thinking and the ability to process two realities at once.
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"Observing anger communicated through sarcasm enhances complex thinking and solving of creative problems," lead author Ella Miron-Spektor wrote in the study.
The study has been published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.
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