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The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program was created to help people who are living and trying to cope with the pain and the stress of difficult life circumstances. One of the most common (and very painful) stressors experienced in our lives arises out of the workplace.
I had breakfast a week or so ago with a friend who told me about his wife's experience with "The Boss From Hell." Let's just call her the "BFH." When the BFH arrived as the new supervisor at my friend's workplace, things immediately went sour for her (and she had been an excellent employee for years, with outstanding performance reviews, and a lot of responsibility). Although she had always worked far more than her required 8 hours per day, all her movements in and out of the office were suddenly subjected to strict scrutiny. She had no leeway at all as to her arrival and departure times. She was given new assignments that would have been appropriate for an entry-level worker, but not for a person with a graduate degree in her field. She was repeatedly raked over the coals by her supervisor, for not having done tasks that had never been assigned to her. I have written about this phenomenon of "workplace bullying" before (click here); today I found some interesting new research (click here), about what happens in a person's brain when this sort of disempowerment takes place:
It appears that if you cause a person to be placed into a position of “low power,” then that person’s cognitive functioning (capacity to make effective and sound decisions, for example) will be impaired, compared to the people who are placed into positions of “high power.” Here is an excerpt from the “Science Daily” piece about this research:
“New research appearing in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that being put in a low-power role may impair a person’s basic cognitive functioning and thus, their ability to get ahead… In one experiment, the participants completed a Stroop task, a common psychological test designed to exercise executive functions. Participants who had earlier been randomly assigned to a low-power group made more errors in the Stroop task than those who had been assigned to a high-power group. Smith and colleagues also found that these results were not due to low-power people being less motivated or putting in less effort. Instead, those lacking in power had difficulty maintaining a focus on their current goal.”
This research is really not surprising, in light of prior research that has long indicated that, among primates, when an individual is eliminated from a powerful position, that individual experiences an impairment in the functioning of his serotonin system (serotonin is a neurotransmitter involved in many brain functions, including mood regulation). And, together, these lines of research would seem to demonstrate that adverse employment actions can cause workers to experience significant incapacitation: clinically significant depression, for example, and impairments in judgment and decision-making capacity. And this will likely have a negative impact on the employee’s subsequent performance on the job.
Accordingly, we can see more clearly what kind of biological effect the actions of a workplace supervisor can have on her/his employees. In situations (all too common) involving a workplace supervisor who engages in bullying-type actions with employees, the targeted employee will experience changes in his or her brain that will very likely be reflected in his/her mood and capacity to continue to work effectively. For example, supervisors who want to punish an employee might take actions such as: removing the employee from leadership positions; shifting job responsibilities around in such a way that the employee experiences a diminished sense of control over his/her workplace duties; or outright demotion. And I suspect that even seeing one’s colleague being treated unfairly might well cause co-workers to experience a feeling of fear and disempowerment, thus spreading the ensuing dysfunction even more broadly throughout the workplace. Common sense and life experience tell us that any of these actions will cause employees to have negative emotional responses; now, we can see a bit more about how the brain changes to produce these negative effects.
In the MBSR program, we help people to learn new methods for coping with these after-effects of stressful events; we are teaching people techniques by which they can use their own minds to change the pathways within their brains, thereby relieving much of the suffering that goes along with the traumas we experience in life.
