Professor’s new book explores emotional demands faced by workplace leaders

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – It’s no great insight to say the workplace has changed significantly in recent years, due to disruptions like the COVID-19 pandemic and new technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). But there are solid, scientifically proven ways for managers to deal with the emotional demands of these challenges, according to a new book co-written by Penn State Liberal Arts Professor of Psychology Alicia Grandey.

Grandey and executive coach Dina Denham Smith are the authors of “Emotionally Charged: How to Lead in the New World of Work,” which was published this week by Oxford University Press.

Combining scientific evidence with interviews and case studies, Grandey said the book provides leaders — everyone from shift managers to top-level executives — with practical strategies to manage the emotional ups and downs of the workplace and serve as better leaders for their employees.

“It’s really about sharing knowledge about emotions and strategies for handling triggering events as they occur in the workplace — so that you’re able to do this in a way that you don’t burn out,” said Grandey, a specialist in industrial-organizational psychology who serves as director of Penn State’s Workplace Emotional Labor and Diversity (WELD) Lab and Healthy-Inclusive-Productive (HIP) Workplace Initiative.

Grandey and Smith are longtime friends who met during graduate school at Colorado State University. The idea for the book came out of a Harvard Business Review article they wrote a few years ago.

“The article was very well received and drew a lot of interest, so that let us know the book was worth pursuing. It let us know there was a market for it,” Grandey said. “When it came time to collaborate on the book, we were applying what we were writing in real time. Dina knows what leaders are struggling with because of her executive coaching experience, so she would write the beginning draft of each chapter, based on a case study or her experience. And then I would revise based on specific evidence to ensure the ideas were supported by science. Then we packaged it in a way that’s digestible for a broad audience.”

Grandey has spent over 25 years researching the concept of “emotional labor,” or how people regulate or manage their emotional reactions with others as part of their job duties. Today, she said, workplace leaders have more emotional labor to contend with than ever before, whether they’re supporting employees’ mental health needs, contending with escalating anxieties over AI’s role in the workplace or demonstrating compassion to staff while still expecting them to be productive.

Making matters worse, leaders haven’t been equipped with the skills needed to navigate these demands, so they react and cope in ways that actually increase stress levels. That leads to burnout, affecting their job performance and overall health, Grandey said.

“It’s always been on leaders to support employees,” she said. “But it’s become more and more expected that leaders need to help employees’ with mental health and personal issues. And since people are struggling more than ever — with fewer connections outside work — leaders are often left tackling things that they weren’t trained to do.”

But it doesn’t have to be this way, Grandey said. Managers can get high performance from their staffs while still being sensitive to their well-being — and their own well-being, for that matter.

“We make it very clear in the book that leaders should not act as therapists,” Grandey said. “You shouldn’t have to try and counsel your employees. But we try to provide some basics about emotional regulation and stress and ways to support people — and how taking care of yourself means you can better support your people.”

The authors devote a good part of the book to debunking myths and showing leaders how to deal with “emotionally demanding work events,” from managing rapidly changing situations, to supporting distressed employees, to handling interpersonal conflicts, to delivering bad news like layoffs or wage cuts.

Instead of properly addressing these emotionally fraught situations, leaders often hold down the tension in their bodies. Grandey and Smith compare it to “holding down a beach ball in the ocean.”

“You can do it, but at some point, it’s going to pop up and hit you or someone in the face,” Grandey said. “When that’s the typical way of interacting, where they push things down, people eventually get physically ill. Because our bodies are holding in energy that’s not available for our immune system, our digestive system, our heart rate. That leads to burnout.”

Leaders can better equip themselves by recognizing their work triggers, whether it be a specific employee or workplace situation, Grandey said.

“You know that person can be a trigger for you and that every time you see them it’s going to be unpleasant,” she said. “You know the interaction is going to drain you, and so you dread it and it creates stress all day long. So, we talk about identifying those triggers, being aware of the things that are going to tax you — regulating emotions in an anticipatory rather than reactive way. It’s figuring out to what extent you can arrange your schedule or day such that if you have to interact with the person or situation that’s taxing, you build in buffers. For instance, maybe you talk to someone afterward who energizes you.”

Throughout the book, Grandey and Smith provide self-assessments and exercises leaders can undertake for better managing workplace stress, including “compassionate detachment,” which is practiced by those in medicine and other caring professions, and their own self-designed Breathe, Recognize, Accept, Verbalize, Engage, or BRAVE, technique. It’s also important to seek out other leaders — within or from outside the organization — for support and to trade tips with, Grandey said.

Grandey said she's confident the book will speak to anyone in a leadership position, “whether you have one direct report or you’re the CEO.”

“Dina and I said we had two goals for this book,” Grandey said. “One was to bring us closer together, which it did. The other was to get it into the hands of the people who can benefit from it the most. Can this be a usable tool and improve the well-being of people? We think it can.”