Crying at the office

The model inherited from the twentieth century cleanly separated two spaces: work, where one held a role, and home, where one was oneself. That separation was partly a fiction, but it provided a simple rule for knowing what it was proper to show.

Contemporary organisations have largely undone that boundary. They speak of authenticity, of bringing the whole person to work, of well-being. The old rule has therefore lost its force without a new one being formulated, which leaves everyone to guess what is acceptable.

Tears have a particular property among affective displays: they are hard to produce deliberately and hard to stop. They are therefore received as a signal that is hard to fake, which gives them a force the witness cannot ignore.

That force explains the discomfort. A hard-to-fake signal commits whoever receives it: doing nothing becomes a decision. A good part of the discomfort attributed to the person crying in fact belongs to those watching, who do not know how to behave.

The available surveys report a markedly higher declared frequency of crying among women than among men, with gaps varying by country. They also report that the same episode is not judged the same way depending on who produces it and on the post they hold.

These two findings do not reduce to each other: the first bears on what happens, the second on what is interpreted. The second is the one with professional consequences.

Professional appraisal frameworks commonly use terms like perspective, composure, the ability to rise above. These phrasings describe a display behaviour, not an inner state: they assess what is seen.

The risk is turning a norm of expression into a criterion of competence, and therefore valuing one position on an axis over another. A very expressive employee can be perfectly reliable, and a very composed employee can be in difficulty with nothing showing.

Article L. 4121-1 of the French Labour Code requires the employer to protect the physical and mental health of workers, which covers psychosocial risks. Emotional demand is among the families of factors recognised by French prevention bodies.

The law of course says nothing about tears themselves. It does, however, shift the question towards the organisation: if a work situation regularly produces such episodes, the object of analysis is the situation, not the person crying.