Swing Your Way to Happiness

Abstract: How do individuals manage frustration in organizations and how can they use Rage rooms as an agency to relocate their experienced frustration into a performance enhancing intervention? The concept of Rage rooms does not only add to the present research, in the field of preventive mechanism of organizational aggression, but also overlaps with theories of Catharsis. The hypotheses are drawn from literature covering cognitive psychology and management theory. An experimental research design and a laboratory field study has been used to evaluate the difference in experienced frustration and psychological state of two groups; Rage room group and Control group. During the experiments, respondents were first subject to a "bottled up" situation, and were then asked to evaluate the internal and external attributes of "finishing the business" with aggression as a method to reduce frustration. Rage room group used a baseball bat to take out frustration on cardboard boxes (33 participants) and Control group waited silently seated in the same environment where they had been exposed to the frustration trig-ger (31 participants). The results are generalizable and demonstrated significant differences in experienced frustration, affect, satisfaction, aggression, perception of psychological empowerment and counterproductive work behavior between Rage room groups and Control group on the 1% and 5% significance level. While those individuals who engaged in an aggressive episode indicated various positive effects of this method of releasing pressure compared to those participants who merely waited, the findings are still novel and only institute a research field that is in its embryo. The study corresponds to subtle forces that are worth considerably broader and deeper attention in future research concerning preventive monitoring programs for deviant workplace behavior.