Field Test: Help Me, Help You

When a demanding diner began yelling and swearing at Shari Moore, asking to speak to her boss, the newly hired waitress felt shaken.

"I became ultraconscious of what I was doing," says Moore, who began overlooking crucial details of her job. "A good server has to move automatically. If you let every bad customer get in your head, you're going to crack."

Waiter Haters

The service industry is a perfect test bed for studying the effects of aggression on cognition: Employees are forced to stifle their feelings and to keep right on working—no matter how rude someone is. The result? Even minor aggression from customers can negatively affect performance, reports a re-cent study in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Chastised employees get stuck wondering what went wrong, dwelling on the encounter, and feeling upset. All three reactions tax cognitive resources and reduce workers' ability to process information, which ultimately leads to errors on the job.

Brain Drain

Smarter people—who theoretically have more brainpower to spare—are surprisingly no better off than others. "They have more resources, but what's probably happening is that they take all their resources and invest them in dealing with the rudeness instead of handling the task," says study author Amir Erez, a professor at the University of Florida's business school.

Grin and Bear It?

Cheerful employees may also be at a disadvantage when a grumpy customer rolls in, finds a study in Motivation and Emotion. After experiencing rudeness, upbeat people felt even worse than did their less enthusiastic coworkers, perhaps because ungratefulness is more jarring to employees who are really trying to be helpful. And the more people expend energy by faking enthusiasm, notes Penn State psychologist Alicia Grandey, the more quickly they burn glucose the brain might otherwise use for cognitive tasks.

View From the Top

Smiles and smarts may not help manage rude customers, but the study found one talent—and only one—that seemed to ease the cognitive load. When employees excelled at taking another person's perspective, being berated had little effect on their performance. Why? Emotional distance makes verbal aggression less taxing, and those who can step into an angry customer's shoes may be able to see that an outburst is more a reflection of a customer's feelings than a referendum on a worker's skills, Erez suggests.

Fortunately, observes John Willis, who handled calls at Ticketmaster for two years, working with irate customers gets easier with experience. "After so many times of having your life threatened as soon as you say hello," he says, "the effect kind of wears off."