Study Confirms: Your work performance sucks after your team loses

Your guide to making it through the day when your team tanks

Let’s face it, Mondays (and Tuesdays) are already rough enough without having to watch your team lose miserably the night before.

But new research in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology suggests that your team’s lousy track record could throw you off your A-game at the office as well.

In the study, researchers polled a group of soccer fans for four weeks. On each Monday after their teams played on Sunday, the participants rated their mood, work engagement, and job performance.

The verdict: When their team lost, they reported more negatively on all three counts.

That’s because your attachment to a particular team becomes part of your identity, says study co-author Panagiotis Gkorezis, Ph.D. of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. And when they get demolished, it can feel like you’ve lost something important in your personal life.

So how do you beat the post-defeat funk?

Before even heading out the door on Monday morning, try to think about an exciting project or interesting challenge you’ve got going on at the office, Gkorezis says.

Getting yourself to focus on a motivating aspect of work shortly after the game will stop you from ruminating on why your team lost and put you in the right mindset for the upcoming workday, he says.