Stressed to impress

Workplace small talk is similar no matter where you go. We love bringing up safe but boring subjects like the weather, the latest viral Netflix series, or even just the weekend's football results. Occasionally, we talk about work itself: workloads, deadlines — and commonly, how stressed we are.

While sharing our stresses can serve as a bonding activity, sometimes talking about how stressed we are can constitute a form of bragging, hinting at our importance and serving as a badge of honour in the workplace. And the ways we share our stressors, a new study finds, can have broader impacts on those around us. Writing in Personnel Psychology, Jessica B. Rodell and team find that bragging about how stressed we are can actually alienate co-workers, making us seem less warm and even less competent.

In the first study, 360 US-based participants (recruited online) read a vignette describing a co-worker who had recently returned from a regional conference and was sharing with them how it had gone. Participants were assigned one of four vignettes:

• A control vignette, in which they simply explained that the trip had been good and reported the location of next year's conference. 
• A 'talking about stress' vignette, in which the co-worker noted that "things have been quite stressful of late."
• A stress bragging vignette, in which the co-worker responded that the conference was good, but that it was "just one more thing on my full plate... you have no idea the stress I'm under."
• And finally, a self-promotion vignette, in which they bragged about receiving an award and how thoroughly they conducted their work, but did not mention stress.

After reading this vignette, participants filled in an evaluation of their colleague. Those who had witnessed their colleague bragging about their levels of stress were significantly less likely to consider them warm or capable, even compared to those who took the opportunity to self-promote. Participants were also less likely to want to act helpfully towards their braggadocious colleagues.

The next study took a closer look at the effects of stress-bragging on bystanders. Here, 187 pairs of employees and co-workers completed three online surveys, each spaced two weeks apart. Firstly, these participants indicated how much they felt their co-worker had been boasting, gloating, or bragging about the stress they were under at work. Next, as in the previous study, the team asked participants to indicate their perceptions of their co-worker's competence, warmth, and their own willingness to help them with tasks. Finally, participants indicated their own levels of stress and burnout, both at work and beyond it.

Similar to the first study, co-workers that bragged about their stress were perceived as less competent and less warm, resulting in participants feeling less inclined to lend them a hand. This investigation also found the co-workers' stress-bragging was with wider impacts on those around them, with their teammates reporting feeling significantly more stressed and burned out themselves.

The authors suggest this could be caused by a sort of ripple effect: instead of creating camaraderie, bragging about workload may create a "transfer of stress" that adds to a general sense of anxiety at work, which could even spread throughout the organisation. Hearing a co-worker stress-bragging could leave employees comparing themselves to their colleagues, perhaps seeding worry about their own perceived lack of stress and importance, or reminding them of their own (perhaps unfinished) workload. Future research could look at this element.
    
If you feel the need to vent about work, though, don't worry too much. Simply talking about stress, rather using it as an opportunity to make yourself seem indispensable, did not make people feel less warm towards their colleagues. The comradery of venting at the proverbial water cooler remains, it seems, as long as it's framed correctly.  

Read the paper in full:

Rodell, J. B., Shanklin, B. C., & Frank, E. L. (2024). "I'm so stressed!": The relational consequences of stress bragging. Personnel Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12645