Conference treats all angles of workplace

There's nothing worse than being an angry woman in the workplace. Even if a colleague blows an important client relationship by not showing up for a sales call and losing the account in the process.

Nope, she can't get angry.

Not if she wants to get hired. Not if she wants to get paid. Not if she wants some status in her firm.

A man can blow his top, stomp his feet, and shout, and what'll it get him? A raise. Respect. Status.

What it'll get a woman?

$14,000 less a year.

That's the conclusion of research that will be presented today at the Academy of Management conference in Philadelphia at the Convention Center.

Nine thousand scholars from almost every business school on the globe can choose among 1,700 symposia and presentations of academic papers, including the one on gender differences in anger in the workplace by Yale researcher Victoria Brescoll.

Other sessions will focus on management in private-equity situations. One symposium on immigration will team academicians with Sam Rovit, president of Swift & Co., the meatpacking company raided on Dec. 12 by 1,000 federal agents looking for undocumented workers.

The conference started Friday and runs through Wednesday.

When the academy last held its conference in Philadelphia in 1957, there were 247 members. Now there are 18,000 from 100 countries.

"The issues in management are the same around the world," said Angelo DeNisi, program chairman and dean of the Freeman School of Business of Tulane University in New Orleans. "But the solutions are not the same."

For example, he said, managers in all countries seek feedback to improve performance. The U.S. concept of 360-degree feedback, where a manager is evaluated by supervisors, peers and underlings, would be unheard of in China. Only a superior's opinion is worthy, he said.

DeNisi came up with the theme of this year's conference: "Doing Well by Doing Good."

"It is possible to be cynical about it," DeNisi said. No one, he said, has to think hard to come up with the names of companies that pollute the environment or shortchange their workers.

But, he said, companies are coming to a "greater realization that we are all in this together" in the long run. For example, helping with education produces better workers and smarter consumers.

Academy president Ken Smith, a University of Maryland professor of business strategy and author of books on management, said it was up to academicians to provide the solid research that will show whether kind-hearted management benefits the bottom line.

"It takes a while for research and theories to begin to affect practice," he said. Given the size and reach of companies, "to the extent we can show that 'doing well by doing good' is a better approach, then it seems to me that we have the potential to help not only organizations, but to help the world."

That's on a macro-level.

And then, there are the less-global topics covered by researchers such as Brescoll who titled her paper "When Can An Angry Woman Get Ahead?"

(The answer is never, but if she explains herself, it's not so bad, Brescoll said. If an angry man explains himself, he loses points.)

In her study, participants were shown four job-interview videotapes - two with a male candidate, two with a female. The scripts were identical, except for two words - "angry" and "sad."

At the end of the interview, each candidate, asked to relate a time when something went wrong, recited the same tale of the blown sales call and then answered: "I felt angry," or "I felt sad."

Viewers were asked to rate the candidates in terms of hireability, potential pay and status. Angry men came out on top, then sad men, then sad women, with angry women scoring lowest.

When men were angry, it was considered a reasonable response to a tough situation. When women got angry in the same situation, they were being emotional, Brescoll said.

People in managerial positions should be aware of this bias, she said, and consciously try to counter it in their own dealings with female employees.

"It is interesting studying these issues," Brescoll said. "It makes me a lot more conscious - you might even say paranoid - about how I behave."