Have you ever had a boss that drove you up the wall? You know, the kind that made you furious, made your blood boil, and who you raged against even when you weren’t at work?
Well, I have some good news for you! A study shows that stabbing a voodoo doll of your boss can make you feel less resentful and even improve the quality of your work.
A study of more than 200 workers in the United States and Canada showed that workers who engaged in “symbolic retaliation” (like stabbing a voodoo doll) made workers feel better and lowered “feelings of injustice” by one-third.
Photo Credit: Pexels
The subjects in the study used an online voodoo doll program on Dumb.com that allows you to name the doll and then abuse it in a variety of ways: you can stick it with pins (the old fashioned way!), pinch the doll with pliers, or burn it with a match.
One of the study’s authors, Dr. Lindie Liang of Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, said…
“We wanted to see, rather than actually retaliating against the abusive boss, whether mistreated employees could benefit from harmless acts of symbolic retaliation.”
Bizarre study reveals STABBING a voodoo doll gives angry employees a sense of justice against their bosses https://t.co/3RZdNlflf0
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) March 11, 2018
The subjects were asked to remember and visualize a time when a superior at work was abusive. They were then asked to either go to work on the voodoo doll or to finish a written exercise that called on them to fill in the blanks to complete words. The participants who used the voodoo doll were much less likely to still feel bitter after the experiment concluded and were better at completing the word task than those who hadn’t used the voodoo doll.
Photo Credit: Flickr,Siaron James
The study says…
“These findings suggest that retaliation not only benefits individual victims, but may also benefit the organization as a whole, given that justice perceptions is important for employee performance and well-being.”
Now, you actually don’t want to get caught with a voodoo doll of your boss because it might lead to some problems, so be careful. Buuuut, maybe keep it in your car so you can use it on your lunch break or at home for some after-work stress relief. Good luck!
