Sleep Deprivation Makes an Employee Hostile

By siliconindia  |   Monday, 30 January 2012, 22:18 IST   |    1 Comments
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Bangalore: Sleep deprivation turns people grumpy, insensitive, and dulls their cognitive abilities, reveals Academy of Management Journal by Michael Christian and Aleksander Ellis. The two interesting studies on sleep deprivation that was published in the October issue of the journal has found that, when an individual suffered sleep deprivation, they suffered from both loss of self control (measured with items like "my will power is gone" and reverse-scored "I feel calm and rational") and to feel more hostile (measured with items like "scornful" and "disgusted").

The field research with 171 nurses found out that, the nurses who were suffering sleep deprivation had bad emotional conditions and as a result they were engaged more in workplace abnormality, like, things falsifying receipts for reimbursement, used drugs or booze on the job, said something hurtful to someone at work, dragging out work to get overtime, and intentionally working slower.

This repulsive behavior that was observed in the workplace was represented in a more controlled experiment which involved 75 students. In the experiment process, the researchers kept awake half of the students for a night in the lab and the other half of students reported in the morning after a good night's sleep. The experiment added a complete twist, as when the researchers created a situation, where there was an incentive for students to cheat the answers from the test they took. It was observed that most of the students who stole the answers were sleep deprived.

Further, the study demonstrates that sleep deprivation causes lack of self control and hostile behaviors. According to Bob Sutton work matters, such kind of a study is quite disturbing, as so many crucial decisions are made by people who are sleep deprived, like the doctors who serve during the time of emergency or the government officials who have to take important decisions during crucial situations.

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