Abstract
The construct of interpersonal anger relates to how an individual’s potential to anger towards others may be influenced by the characteristics of those people targeted. These may include the relative relationship to the target, such as how intimately they know each other, or their relative positions within a social hierarchy, for example, within a workplace. The McLinton Interpersonal Domain-specific Anger Instrument (MIDAI) has been tested in Australia and Japan in order to identify similarities and differences in the nature of the anger experience. It allows a researcher to build an “interpersonal anger profile” for an individual or group, which details the varying predispositions to anger towards different individuals based on their relationship (family member, stranger, work colleague). Data from two random stratified community samples were collected from metropolitan Nagoya, Japan (N = 300), and Adelaide, Australia (N = 301), yielding a workplace interpersonal anger profile for each of the two samples. The Japanese workers reported different levels of interpersonal anger depending on the target’s organisational status relative to their own (i.e., superior, co-worker, or subordinate), suggesting that workplace social hierarchy influenced the Japanese interpersonal anger profile. Australian workers did not differ in interpersonal anger towards others in the workplace, suggesting less influence of social hierarchy. Levels of interpersonal anger towards supervisors differed between Australian and Japanese workers, indicating that the tendency to anger towards others may be influenced by sociocultural variables. The importance of understanding cross-cultural differences in anger in the Asia-Pacific region is also discussed.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Allan, S., & Gilbert, P. (2001). Anger and anger expression in relation to perceptions of social rank, entrapment and depressive symptoms. Personality and Individual Differences, 32, 551–565.
Allport, G. W. (1985). The historical background of social psychology. In G. Lindzey & E. Aronson (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (pp. 1–46). New York: McGraw Hill.
Amagasa, T., Nakayama, T., & Takahashi, Y. (2005). Karojisatsu in Japan: Characteristics of 22 cases of work-related suicide. Journal of Occupational Health, 47(2), 157–164.
Arnold, H. J., & Feldman, D. C. (1981). Social desirability response bias in self-report choice situations. The Academy of Management Journal, 24(2), 377–385.
Averill, J. R. (1982). Anger and aggression: An essay on emotion. New York: Springer.
Axelrod, R. (1973). Schema theory: An information processing model of perception and cognition. The American Political Science Review, 67(4), 1248–1266.
Bhagat, R. S., & Steers, R. M. (2009). Cambridge handbook of culture, organizations, and work. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Clegg, S., & Kono, T. (2002). Trends in Japanese management. Asia Pacific Journal of Management Singapore, 19(2), 269–278.
de Frank, R. S., Ivancevich, J. M., & Schweiger, D. M. (1988). Job stress and mental wellbeing: Similarities and differences among American, Japanese, and Indian managers. Behavioral Medicine, 14, 160–170.
Einarsen, S., & Mikkelsen, E. G. (2003). Individual effects of exposure to bullying at work. In S. Einarsen, H. Hoel, D. Zapf, & C. L. Cooper (Eds.), Bullying and emotional abuse in the workplace. International perspectives in research and practice (pp. 127–144). London: Taylor & Francis.
Giorgi, G. (2010). Workplace bullying partially mediates the climate-health relationship. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 25(7), 727–740.
Giorgi, G., & Majer, V. (2009). Mobbing virus organizzativo (mobbing organizational virus). Firenze: Giunti Os Organizzazioni Speciali.
Giorgi, G., Asakura, T., & Ando, M. (2008). The unknown side of workplace bullying research: The case of Japan. Risorsa Uomo, 14(1), 31–40.
Goto, M. (2006). Increasing non-standard workers and what generates dissolution of the Japanese employment practice. Josei Roudou Kenkyu, 49, 60–75 (in Japanese).
Hadley, G. S. (1999). Innovative curricula in tertiary ELT: A Japanese case study. ELT Journal, 53(2), 92–99.
Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.
Hoggan, B., & Dollard, M. F. (2007). Effort-reward imbalance at work and driving anger in an Australian Community Sample. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 39, 1286–1295.
Idris, M. A., & Dollard, M. F. (2011). Psychosocial safety climate, work conditions, and emotions in the workplace: A Malaysian population-based work stress study. International Journal of Stress Management, 18(4), 324–347.
Irie, M., Miyata, M., Nagata, S., Mishima, N., Ikeda, M., & Hirayama, S. (1997). The relationship between workers’ attitudes towards health, lifestyle and mental health. Journal of Occupational Health, 39, 107–115 (in Japanese).
Iwata, N., Okuyama, Y., Kawakami, Y., & Saito, K. (1989). Prevalence of depressive symptoms in a Japanese occupational setting: A preliminary study. American Journal of Public Health, 79, 1486–1489.
Jones, D. L., Tanigawa, T., & Weiss, S. M. (2003). Stress management and workplace disability in the US, Europe and Japan. Journal of Occupational Health, 45(1), 1–7.
Kanai, A. (2006). Economic and employment conditions, karoshi (work to death), and the trend of studies of workaholism in Japan. In R. J. Burke (Ed.), Research companion to working time and work addiction (pp. 158–172). Northampton: Edward Elgar.
Kanai, A. (2009). Karoshi (work to death) in Japan. Journal of Business Ethics, 84, 209–216.
Kawakami, N., & Haratani, T. (1999). Epidemiology of job stress and health in Japan: Review of current evidence and future direction. Industrial Health, 37, 174–186.
Kelley, H. H., & Michela, J. L. (1980). Attribution theory and research. Annual Review of Psychology, 31, 457–501.
Kumashiro, M., & Nagae, S. (1984). Workers’ subjective feeling of fatigue and attitudes towards work-effects of age and job difference. Sangyo Ika Daigaku Zasshi, 6, 273–281 (in Japanese).
Liu, C., Spector, P. E., & Shi, L. (2007). Cross-national job stress: A quantitative and qualitative study. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 28(2), 209–239.
Mann, L. (1992). Stress, affect, and risk taking. In J. F. Yates (Ed.), Risk-taking behavior (pp. 202–230). Oxford: Wiley.
Matsumoto, D. (1989). Cultural influences on the perception of emotion. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 20(1), 92–105.
Matsumoto, O. (2000). People power, Japanese style. Newsweek (Pacific Edition), 135(14), 60.
McLinton, S. S., & Dollard, M. F. (2010). Work stress and driving anger in Japan. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 42(1), 174–181.
McLinton, S. S., & Dollard, M. F. (2013). How we look at others in anger: Development of the McLinton interpersonal domain-specific anger instrument (MIDAI). In M. G. Penrod & S. N. Paulk (Eds.), Psychology of anger: New research (pp. 1–26). New York: Nova Science Publishers.
Meek, C. B. (2004). The dark side of Japanese management in the 1990’s: Karoshi and ijime in the Japanese workplace. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 19(3), 268–274.
Ministry of Health Labor and Welfare. (2007, May 16). Worker’s accident compensation approved as caused by karoshi or mental disorders. Tokyo: Gyosei (in Japanese).
Neuman, J. H., & Baron, R. A. (1998). Workplace violence and workplace aggression: Evidence concerning specific forms, potential causes, and preferred targets. Journal of Management, 24(3), 391–419.
Ralston, D. A., Holt, D. H., Terpstra, R. H., & Kai-Cheng, Y. (1997). The impact of national culture and economic ideology on managerial work values: A study of the United States, Russia, Japan, and China. Journal of International Business Studies, 28(1), 177–207.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (pp. 173–220). New York: Academic.
Tanaka, T. (2001). The identity formation of the victim of ‘shunning’. School Psychology International, 22(4), 463–476.
Taylor, S. E., & Crocker, J. (1981). Schematic bases of social information processing. In E. T. Higgins, P. C. Herman, & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Social cognition (pp. 89–134). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Kim, H. S., Jarcho, J., Takagi, K., & Dunagan, M. S. (2004). Culture and social support: Who seeks it and why? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(3), 354–362.
Treml, J. N. (2001). Bullying as a social malady in contemporary Japan. International Social Work, 44(1), 107–117.
Tsutsumi, A., Kayaba, K., Theorell, T., & Siegrist, J. (2001a). Association between job stress and depression among Japanese employees threatened by job loss in a comparison between two complementary job-stress models. Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, 27(2), 146–153.
Tsutsumi, A., Kayaba, K., Tsutsumi, K., & Igarashi, M. (2001b). Association between job strain and prevalence of hypertension: A cross sectional analysis in a Japanese working population with a wide range of occupations: The Jichi Medical School cohort study. Occupational and Environmental Medicine, 58, 367–373.
West, R. J., Elander, J., & French, D. (1993). Mild social deviance, Type-A behaviour pattern and decision-making style as predictors of self-reported driving style and traffic accident risk. British Journal of Psychology, 84(2), 207–219.
Wyatt, L. W. (1998). Attributional style of aggressive and nonaggressive. Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 58(12), 6798.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McLinton, S.S., Dollard, M.F. (2014). Australian and Japanese Differences in Predispositions to Anger: Looking at Targets of Interpersonal Anger in the Workplace. In: Dollard, M., Shimazu, A., Bin Nordin, R., Brough, P., Tuckey, M. (eds) Psychosocial Factors at Work in the Asia Pacific. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8975-2_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-8975-2_10
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-8974-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-8975-2
eBook Packages: Behavioral ScienceBehavioral Science and Psychology (R0)