Chapter 7: Stress and Well-being at Work 123
7STRESS and WELL-BEING at WORK
Chapter Scan
Stress can be beneficial or negative. Stress is inevitable, yet the techniques and approaches we choose to handle negative stress with are increasing. Some individuals and some circumstances are more at risk for high stress than others. The benefits of controlling stress in the workplace are reviewed.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
1.Define stress, distress, strain, and eustress.
2.Compare four different approaches to stress.
3.Explain the psychophysiology of the stress response.
4.Identify work and nonwork causes of stress.
5.Describe the benefits of eustress and the costs of distress.
6.Discuss four moderators of the stress-strain relationship.
7.Distinguish the primary, secondary, and tertiary stages of preventive stress management.
8.Discuss organizational and individual methods of preventive stress management.
Chapter 7: Stress and Well-being at Work 1
Key terms
The following key terms are introduced in Chapter 7.
stress
stressor
distress
strain
homeostasis
ego-ideal
self-image
eustress
participation problem
performance decrement
compensation award
Type A behavior pattern
personality hardiness
transformational coping
self-reliance
counterdependence
overdependence
preventative stress management
primary prevention
secondary prevention
tertiary prevention
THE CHAPTER SUMMARIZED
I.LOOKING AHEAD: Deregulation, Stress, Financial Risk, and Airline Safety
II.WHAT IS STRESS?
Stress is the unconscious preparation to fight or flee that a person experiences when faced with any demand. Stress does not necessarily have to be destructive. Distress consists of the adverse psychological, physical, behavioral, and organizational consequences that may arise as a result of stressful events. A stressor is the person or the event that triggers the stress response.
A.Four Approaches to Stress
1.The Homeostatic/Medical Approach
Walter Cannon was the physiologist who discussed the stress response, and he initially named it "the emergency response,” or "the militaristic response." A steady state balance, or equilibrium, is homeostasis, which is upset when a person faces an external demand. The body has natural processes to keep it in homeostasis.
2.The Cognitive Appraisal Approach
Richard Lazarus made contributions related to the psychology of stress. What is stressful for one person, may not be stressful for another. Stress is a result of the person-environment interaction. The person's cognitive appraisal of a situation as stressful is a key part of the stress process.
3.The Person-Environment Fit Approach
Robert Kahn determined that there is a person-environment fit when skills and abilities match role expectations. Stress occurs when expectations are conflicting or confusing, or when a person's resources are unable to meet the expectations.
4.The Psychoanalytic Approach
This approach is based on Freudian psychoanalytic theory. Harry Levinson believes that two elements taken together cause stress. The ego-ideal is the embodiment of a person's perfect self. In contrast, the self-image is how a person sees himself or herself. Stress results when there is a discrepancy between the two.
B.The Stress Response
The stress response is a combination of mind and body events. The stress response prepares the mind and body for fight-or-flight. It can be very functional.
III.SOURCES OF STRESS AT WORK
The four sources of stress for people at work are: task demands, role demands, interpersonal demands, and physical demands.
A.Task Demands
Uncertainty and lack of control are two of the most stressful demands people face at work. Laid-off employees have referred to the day after being laid off as the day they regained control of their lives. Sometimes the dread of being selected in a layoff is worse than actually being laid off. Similarly, one study found that heart attacks are more common when individuals have little control and heavy work demands. Other task demands include career progress, work overload, and new technologies.
B.Role Demands
Two factors that constitute role demands are role conflict and role ambiguity. When an individual receives inconsistent or incompatible expectations they experience role ambiguity. Interrole conflict occurs when individuals receive cultural messages to enjoy life and spend meaningful time with families, at the same time they are rewarded for working harder and longer hours on the job.
C.Interpersonal Demands
Individuals seem especially stressed when they are in situations where they must work with abrasive personalities. Some organizational cultures tolerate abrasive personalities on the basis of their productivity. Individuals face interpersonal conflict when they expect a leadership style that is different than what they are accustomed to working with.
D.Physical Demands
The environment in which an individual works can be a very stressful situation based on physical demands. Most people can list extreme, or typical conditions, yet, faulty air cooling or warming environments can provoke irritability among employees, which leads to mistakes. Even working with computer equipment can be physically demanding if it is not designed ergonomically.
E.Nonwork Demands
Most individuals have stressors that affect their energy and attention level on their job. The most obvious ones are related to family demands, yet these are not the only ones that are experienced. As the society ages, more working individuals will have responsibility for taking care of their aging parents, many of whom will be living with them.
IV.THE CONSEQUENCES OF STRESS
The benefits of stress are captured with the term eustress, which stands for healthy, normal stress. Eustress is positive for organizations and individuals.
A.Performance and Health Benefits of Stress
The Yerkes-Dodson law tracks the benefits of stress that lead to improved performance and where the benefits fall off after a certain point. McGrath mentions that performance falls off because of the difficulty of the task to be performed.
B.Individual Distress
Individual distress can be seen in psychological symptoms such as depression, burnout, and psychogenic disorder. The word burnout is probably overused, particularly in regard to individuals who are simply malingering to rationalize failure or boredom. Stress is directly related to medical symptoms, particularly heart disease and strokes, back-aches, peptic ulcer, and headaches. Behavioral problems are another form of distress that are manifested in violence, substance abuse, and accidents.
C.Organizational Distress
Organizational distress can be evident in participation problems, performance decrements, and compensation awards. Participation problems are costs associated with absenteeism, tardiness, strikes and work stoppages. Performance decrements are costs resulting from poor quality or low quantity of production, grievances, and unscheduled machine downtime and repair. Compensation awards are the costs resulting from court awards for job distress.
V.INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN THE STRESS-STRAIN RELATIONSHIP
What is a predictor of stress for one individual does not have the same effect for everyone. The Achilles heel phenomenon suggests that people break down at their weakest point. There are a host of heroic tales that most people could not have handled.
A.Gender Effects
Women and men have different life span expectations, with women typically living seven years longer than men. There are gender differences in stressors experienced and in vulnerability to different stress symptoms.
B.Type A Behavior Pattern
One of the ways to determine the likelihood of stress and coping capability is to examine the type A behavior pattern. Type A behavior pattern is a complex of personality and behavioral characteristics, including competitiveness, time urgency, social status insecurity, aggression, hostility, and a quest for achievements. Type A behavior has been labeled coronary-prone behavior.
C.Personality Hardiness
Personality hardiness describes an individual resistant to distress and characterized by challenge, commitment, and control. Hardy individuals appear to transform the stressful event. Transformational coping is actively changing an event into something less subjectively stressful by viewing it in a broader life perspective. It is useful to point out to students that this is not the same as exhibiting an "I don't care" attitude.
D.Self-Reliance
Self-reliance is a healthy, secure, independent pattern of behavior related to how people form and maintain supportive attachments with others. One opposite extreme, counterdependence, is an unhealthy, insecure pattern of behavior that leads to separation in relationships with other people. Similarly, the overdependent individuals are also unhealthy and insecure, but they are preoccupied with achieving security through relationships.
VI.PREVENTIVE STRESS MANAGEMENT
Since organizations have become aware of the affects of stress on their organizational performance, they are concerned with preventing stress. A preventive stress management approach believes that there is a joint responsibility for promoting health and preventing distress and strain for individuals and organizations. A critical factor in this approach is the stage in which the stress is managed. The three levels of prevention are the primary prevention stage, (designed to reduce or eliminate the stressor), the secondary prevention stage (designed to modify the individual's response to stress), or the tertiary prevention stage (designed to heal symptoms of distress).
A.Organizational Stress Prevention
1.Job Redesign
High job demands and restricted decision latitude are characteristics of high strain jobs. Job redesign is a core characteristic of the Hackman model for motivation. The goal is to enhance worker control.
2.Goal Setting
Goal setting increases task motivation by reducing role conflict and ambiguity while focusing attention on the task.
3.Role Negotiation
Role negotiation reduces stress by allowing individuals to modify their work
roles.
4.Social Support Systems
Studies have determined that the support of co-workers and supervisors may be one of the most important factors in managing stress in the workplace.
B.Individual Prevention
1.Learned Optimism
Learned optimism begins with identifying pessimistic thoughts and then distracting oneself from these thoughts.
2.Time Management
There are numerous approaches to time management. One of the approaches for time management is to separate the urgent from the priority.
3.Leisure Time Activities
"Leisure is not gained by simply being out of work" is a concept that is difficult to live by. Many people work at their leisure. Students may be more active on their leisure time than their parents, for example. Do they see this as leisure in both instances?
4.Physical Exercise
Aerobic exercise and flexibility training are important to stress prevention.
5.Relaxation Training
The use of prayer and meditation can help prevent stress.
6.Diet
A healthy diet is important to overall health thus reducing vulnerability to distress.
7.Opening Up
Opening up at work implies that an individual trusts colleagues with self-disclosure. Sensitivity training approaches from the 1960s were intended to increase self-disclosure.
8.Professional Help
Increasingly, organizations are encouraging their employees to seek professional help if it is warranted. The ways in which they support this is through compensation benefits, release time for appointments, and through employee assistance plans.
C.Comprehensive Health Promotion
Create strong and health conscious employees through building on individual prevention and life-style changes.
VII.MANAGERIAL IMPLICATIONS: STRESS WITHOUT DISTRESS
VIII.LOOKING BACK: Serious Fun at Southwest Airlines
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Stress is the unconscious preparation to fight or flee when faced with any demand. Distress is the adverse consequence of stress.
Four approaches to understanding stress are the homeostatic/medical approach, the cognitive appraisal approach, the person-environment fit approach, and the psychoanalytic approach.
The stress response is a natural mind-body response characterized by four basic mind-body changes.
Employees face task, role, interpersonal, and physical demands at work, along with nonwork (extraorganizational) demands. Global competition and advanced technologies create new stresses at work.
Nonwork stressors, such as family problems and work-home conflicts, can affect an individual's work life and home life.
Stress has health benefits, including enhanced performance.
Distress is costly to both individuals and organizations.
Individual diversity requires attention to gender, Type A behavior, personality hardiness, and self-reliance in determining the links between stress and strain.
Preventive stress management aims to enhance health and reduce distress or strain. Primary prevention focuses on the stressor, secondary prevention focuses on the response to the stressor, and tertiary prevention focuses on symptoms of distress.
REVIEW QUESTIONS: Suggested Answers
1. Define stress, distress, strain, and eustress.
Stress is the unconscious preparation to fight or flee that a person experiences when faced with any demand. Distress is the adverse psychological, physical, behavioral, and organizational consequences that may arise as a result of stressful events. Strain is distress. Eustress is healthy, normal stress.
2. Describe four approaches to understanding stress. How does each add something new to our understanding of stress?
(1) The homeostatic/medical model contributes to the flight-or-flight response that we use to define stress. (2) The cognitive appraisal approach contributes the view that we classify events as stressful or not. (3) The person-environment fit approach argues that stress results when the role expectations are confused and/or conflicting. (4) The psychoanalytic approach is based on Freudian theory. This considers the ego-ideal and the self-image, and the comparison between the two.
3. What are the four changes associated with the stress response?
The physical changes are: (1) the redirection of the blood to the brain, (2) increased alertness by way of improved vision, hearing, and other sensory processes, (3) the release of glucose and fatty acids into the bloodstream to sustain the body during the stressful event, (4) depression of the immune system, as well as emergent processes.
4. List three demands of each type: task, role, interpersonal, and physical.
Task demands related to stress are lack of control, uncertainty, career progress, overload, and new technologies. Interpersonal demands are abrasive personalities, sexual harassment, and leadership styles. Physical demands include extreme environments, strenuous activities, and hazardous substances.
5. What is a nonwork demand? How does it affect an individual?
Nonwork demands are personal life stressors that carry into the workplace. Marital expectations, child care and elder care are all demands that may take individuals away from their focus at work, either physically or mentally.
6. Describe the relationship between stress and performance.
Moderate stress has been found to have a positive effect on performance. The Yerkes-Dodson law indicates that there is an optimum point for stress. After this point is reached, the curve turns downward and has negative ramifications on performance. The optimum point will vary from individual to individual.
7. What are the major medical consequences of distress? The behavioral consequences? The psychological consequences?
The most significant medical illnesses of stress are heart disease and strokes, back-aches, peptic ulcers, and headaches. Behavioral problems include violence, substance abuse of various kinds, and accidents. Psychological consequences include depression, burnout, and psychogenic disorders.
8. Why should organizations be concerned about stress at work? What are the costs of stress to organizations?
There are a variety of direct and indirect costs to an organization because of stress. Accidents may happen to the person who is not mentally alert. Stress results in high absenteeism and turnover. Participation problems, performance decrements, and compensation awards are all costs to organizations.
9. How do gender, the Type A behavior pattern, personality hardiness, and self-reliance moderate the relationship between stress and strain?
These are individual factors that affect the connection between the stressors and strains. Type A personality individuals are prone to difficulties because their personalities invite stress. Personality hardiness enhances one's ability to cope with stress. Self-reliance helps individuals manage stress through healthy relationships with others.
10. What is primary stress prevention? Secondary prevention? Tertiary prevention? Describe major organizational stress prevention methods.
All three of these preventions are steps in which organizations attempt interventions to reduce stress. Primary prevention is focused reduction of stress by reducing, modifying or eliminating the stress. Secondary prevention attempts to alter or modify the stress response. Tertiary prevention is reactive, and is designed to heal individuals after the stress has had an impact on the individual. Job redesign is effective because it increases workers' control over their situation. Goal setting increases task motivation, and reduces role conflict and ambiguity. Role negotiation allows individuals to modify their work expectations. Social support systems build a community and socioemotional approach to help support individuals.
11. Describe eight individual stress prevention methods.
Individuals can practice learned optimism, which is a positive way of perceiving actions and events. Time management is a technique to control schedules that cause stress. Leisure activities help one maintain a balanced lifestyle. Secondary prevention methods for individuals include physical exercise, relaxation training, and diet. Tertiary methods include opening up to individuals, which results in taking risks with self disclosure. Professional help may be warranted if the situations are greater than an individual can cope with.
12. What is involved in comprehensive health promotion programs?
The emphasis of the programs is to build "strong and resistant hosts" by aiding individual prevention and life-style change. Some programs include risk assessments, education, diet and exercise assistance, and smoking cessation.