Worth the risk?

PSYCHOLOGY: No matter how much you enjoy your work, there are days when you’d rather not be doing it. Your colleagues have days like that, too, and that’s why it’s sometimes helpful to complain about your jobs. But be careful: too much complaining could cost you your job.

“We need to meet and share stories,” says Gurnek Bains, CEO of YSC corporate psychologists in London. “Trading stories is a bit like monkeys picking fleas off each other. It brings people together,” Bains told the Financial Times. But in difficult economic times, frequent complainers can be among the first to lose their jobs.

“People who are moaners are more likely to get cut in a recession,” says Professor Thierry Guedj, a workplace psychologist at Boston University . “Nobody likes to have them around. It can be very disruptive to have consistent complainers on staff. They bring morale down and reduce productivity.”

“Nobody likes to have consistent complainers around,” says psychologist Thierry Guedj.

Janet Banks agrees. “No one wants to bein the trenches with a miserable moaner who brings everyone down,” says Banks, a former human resources executive and managing director at Chase Manhattan Bank and FleetBoston Financial.

The key, according to Thierry Guedj, is to make complaints constructive. “It’s fine to moan as long as it is done for the benefit of an organization,” he says. “Complaining, for example, about how poor sales are in a company points to a problem that needs to be overcome.”

Although chronic complainers are disruptive, managers should not ignore them completely, says Gurnek Bains. “There are some leaders who just shield themselves from the negative side and it makes it hard for bad news to get through to them. There is generally some kernel of truth in the moaning that needs to be addressed.”