Complaining during closed training: its functions and consequences

: During occupational trainings given to Polish employees, one can quite often observe complaining. The instructor can use it for problem-solving or for purification. Thus, complaining plays an instrumental or cathartic function. This has consequences for the entire training process. The aim of the article is to present the phenomenon of complaining during training courses and to discuss its correlation with different variables such as learning results, participants’ mood and the evaluation of the training course. Questions were therefore posed about which function of complaining would be more conducive to the process of learning the material and result in an improvement of the participants’ mood, as well as how the instructor would be evaluated, at the response level, depending on which function of complaining is activated during the training. In order to answer these questions, the authors designed an experiment in which complaining was induced in members of an organization, performing either an instrumental function or a cathartic function. The results show that the most effective strategy is the use of its object as a point of departure for problem solution.