Cognitive reappraisal: Good for the human, bad for the company

We’re going to use this article and this paper to briefly frame up “cognitive reappraisal,” which is the strategy of re-framing distressing situations to move past the negative emotions they engender. Lest you think we’re going to go down some Woke Rabbit Hole of “Owning Your Trauma,” no, that’s too heady of a post for Mondays.

If you’re a generally logical person, you might see the trade-off here. At the individual level, if you take a distressing situation and re-frame it, you can feel better emotionally, and you’re probably less inclined towards general stress and burnout. That’s good. Now, with most good things there’s a bad flip side (pizza: fat; sex: herpes), and here we have one too. Namely, negative emotions and experiences are very prevalent in the human condition, and as such, dealing with them properly — including realizing what parts of a negative situation you yourself caused — is a powerful sequence too. If you’re always using some hipster-ish strategy to avoid an embrace of the negative, that can make you less of a well-rounded, self-aware person.

And, per that article and paper above, it also means that if you engage in counterproductive workforce stuff, like stealing from petty cash or lying about sick days, you’ll probably just come to rationalize it over time. As the article even directly notes: