My boss said I was ‘emotional’ when I asked for a pay rise

August 14, 2026 — 5:15am

I read your column last week and identified with the question-asker’s situation. Like them, I went through a period of being told during salary reviews that my performance did not warrant a pay increase. At first, this was disappointing but not worrying. The friendly tone of the discussions put my mind at ease and I told myself I just needed to work harder. After the third time, I politely raised the problem of a lack of any pay increase becoming a pay decrease in real terms.

When it happened again the next time, I became incensed. I said that if my performance was really so bad, my employer should just say so, and we could have an honest conversation about whether I needed to look for a new job. I was told I was being “emotional” and “unrealistic”. I look back now and wonder if my employer had a genuine reason for doing this or if I was blatantly being ripped off.

If your work needed to be critically evaluated, it should have been.John Shakespeare

It sounds to me that your employer left you in a kind of career limbo, enacting a professional version of cruel and unusual punishment.

Getting warm and upbeat performance reviews that concluded with “… and you’re not getting a pay increase” would have been disorienting for you. The fact that you felt it necessary to state what should have been the bleeding obvious – that your pay was effectively going backwards – tells me that by the third review, the whole thing was bordering on farce. I’m not even slightly surprised that your frustration eventually boiled over.

If their approach was “genuine”, as you put it, it was certainly not judicious. The point you made in the meeting where you couldn’t hide your anger was a strong one. While it’s important that a performance review never descends into malicious condemnation, if your work needed to be critically evaluated, it should have been.

Like the reader from last week who was left without answers to fundamental questions, you weren’t given anywhere near enough information.

When your boss resorted to labelling your concerns as “emotional” and “unrealistic”, they were stooping to a deep rhetorical low.

Unlike the case of the reader from last week, however, I suspect this is not a problem caused by an ultimate decision-maker assuming that the (possibly shallow) determination they had come to was self-evident and so would naturally be accepted by the person affected by it.

In that case, I think the boss was over-confident to the point of ignoring the valuable contribution of their employee. In your case, my guess is that you had a manager bereft of conviction. The giveaway for me was the sudden shift from genial pussyfooting to withering condescension.

When your boss resorted to labelling your concerns as “emotional” and “unrealistic” they were stooping to a deep rhetorical low. To my mind, this is a slightly less insulting way of expressing that classic in the genre of belittling evasion, “you’re being hysterical”.

Apart from being disastrously unprofessional, it strikes me as the ad hominem attack of a person who has nothing to support their main contention.

Yes, it can be difficult when a work conversation becomes heated. And, yes, it’s easy to get swept up in such an escalation and say something regrettable. But I’m not convinced that this was just an ill-chosen, spur-of-the-moment retort to your animated demand.

If it had been, your manager would likely have later expressed remorse or at least tried to explain what they meant by “unrealistic”. They never did.

With all that in mind, I can’t say for sure that you were being “ripped off”, but I doubt very much whether your manager was acting in good faith. Even still, I don’t necessarily think the blame lies entirely at their feet.

I think a plausible explanation for what you experienced started with a new policy prescribed by managers at a higher level than your boss. They had the relatively easy job of telling line and middle managers: “We need to drastically cut labour costs.” If there was no plan or strategy behind the directive, your manager may have been burdened with the invidious responsibility of putting the policy into practice all on their own.

They may have found themselves needing to justify your pay freeze even if they didn’t believe it was warranted. And if they actually thought your work was good and/or (as we discussed in last week’s column) that your organisational citizenship was valuable, the weird incongruence between the benevolent tone of the initial meetings and their negative outcomes might be more understandable.

Understandable but not defensible.

Even if the person you reported to was acting under coercion – placed under intense pressure to make decisions they found impossible to defend – their cutting outburst was unnecessary. And the fact you spent years going backwards financially, but were never explicitly told why, is just absurd.