WORKERS STRESS

Topic 9: Worker Stress

Learning Objectives

• Understand the meaning of worker stress.

• Explain the sources of worker stress.

• Understand the measurement of worker stress.

• Explain the effects of work stress.

• Explain ways of coping using organizational coping strategies.

Defining Worker Stress

• According to Riggio (2009), work stress refers to physiological and/or psychological reactions to an event that is perceived to be threatening or taxing.

• Physiological reactions:

  • Increased heart rate

  • Increased respiratory rates

  • Increased blood pressure

  • Profuse sweating

• Psychological reactions:

  • Feeling anxiety

  • Fear

  • Frustration

  • Mental disengagement

Perceptual Processes

• Stress can happen due to perceptual processes. An event that one individual perceives to be stressful may not be labeled as such by someone else.

Sources of Worker Stress

• Stress can arise from either the environment (situational stress) or from an individual’s personal characteristics (dispositional stress).

• Focus primarily on the stress that comes from workplace sources.

• Situational stress:

  • Work task stressors

  • Work role stressors

  • Physical work conditions

  • Interpersonal stress

  • Harassment

  • Organizational change

  • Work-family conflict

• Dispositional stress:

  • Type A behavior pattern

  • Hardiness

  • Self-efficacy

Situational Stress: Work Task Stressors

Work Overload

• A common source of stress resulting when a job requires excessive speed, output, or concentration.

• Attention has been given to technology-related work overload such as the increased volume of information (Belotti, Ducheneaut, Howard, Smith & Grinter, 2005).

• Leads to physiological stress such as high cholesterol and increased heart rate, lower quality of work and job dissatisfaction.

Underutilization

• A source of stress resulting from workers feeling that their knowledge, skills, or energy are not being fully used.

• Some college graduates in low-level clerical or customer service positions may feel stress due to underutilization of their KSA (French, Caplan & Harrison, 1982).

Karoshi: Death by Overload (Video Summary)

• Karoshi = death by overload

• Work culture: Longest working hours

• Normal working time in Japan: more than 12 hours/day (compared to the normal 8 hours/day)

• Japan corporate culture: Salaryman - Loyalty to the company for entire life (work long hours + participate after-work activities)

• Longer working hours not equally produced a high productivity.

• Individualistic vs collectivism culture

• Changes of government and company’s policies.

Situational Stress: Work Role Stressors

Job Ambiguity

• A source of stress resulting from a lack of clearly defined jobs and/or work tasks.

• Ambiguity in terms of:

  • Responsibilities

  • Duties

  • Conflicting between roles

  • Lack of performance feedback

• Have negative influence on job satisfaction.

Lack of Control

• A source of stress resulting from a feeling of having little input or effect on the job and/or work environment.

• Jobs that are constrained and rule-driven that employees are unable to have any sort of input in work decisions and autonomy.

Physical Work Conditions

• Jobs that must be performed under extreme temperatures, loud and distracting noise, or poor lighting or ventilation can be quite stressful.

• Cramped, crowded, and excessively noisy work environment can cause stress.

Interpersonal Stress

• A source of stress resulting from difficulties with others in the workplace.

• Sources:

  • Top management

  • Head of departments/Supervisor

  • Colleagues/ coworkers

  • Customers/ clients

Harassment

• All forms of harassment including sexual harassment, group membership harassment (gender, race) and being singled out by abusive supervisor or colleague are all extremely stressful.

• Case statistics (2013-2017):

  • Victims:

    • Female: 961

    • Male: 257

    • Total: 1218

  • Suspects:

    • Female: 57

    • Male: 1215

    • Total: 1272

Organizational Change

• Changes in organization due to:

  • Company mergers

  • Acquisitions of one organization by another

  • Changes in work systems and technologies

  • Changes in company policy

Measurement of Worker Stress

Physiological Measures

• Electrocardiogram (EKG/ECG):

  • Electrodes are attached to the individual.

  • Electrodes transmit heart's electrical activity to ECG machine.

  • ECG machine creates wave pattern representing heart's rhythm.

• Blood pressure.

• Cholesterol test.

Self-Report Assessment

• Most self-report assessments fall into 1 of two categories:

  1. Reports about organizational conditions

  2. Reports about psychological and/or physical states

• Reports on Organizational conditions:

  • Job autonomy

  • Feedback

  • Task identity

  • Task significance

  • Skill variety

  • Workload

• Standardized self-report:

  • Stress Diagnostic Survey (SDS)

  • Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI)

  • Job Stress Survey (JSS)

  • Sources of Occupational Stress (SOOS)

Effects of Worker Stress

Physiological Effects

• Ulcers

• Respiratory illnesses

• High blood pressure

• Heart disease

• Cold/ flus/ infection

Emotional and Mental Effects

• Depression

• Anxiety

• Migraine

• Mental disengaged

• Job dissatisfaction

• Emotional exhaustion

Behavioral Effects

• Turnover

• Absenteeism

• Drug abuse

• Poor work performance

• Violent

• Counterproductive behaviors

Managing Your Mind at Work (Video Summary)

• Fighting mental illnesses at workplace.

• Pretended to be OK and problem in trusting the right people to help.

• Long issues of stress leads to depression thus developing serious mental illnesses.

• Cost of mental health to the economy and for the employers.

• Support from the boss, supervisors and colleagues.

• Find expert specialist to help dealing with mental illnesses.

Coping with Worker Stress

Organizational Coping Strategies

• Techniques that organizations can use to reduce stress for all or most employees.

• Because work stress can come from a variety of organizational sources, there are many things that organizations can do to reduce situational stressors in the workplace.

Improve the Person-Job Fit

• A mismatch between a worker’s interests or skills and job requirements can be very stressful.

• By maximizing the person-job fit through careful screening, selection and placement of employees, organization can alleviate a great deal of this stress.

Improve Employee Training and Orientation Programs

• New employees may feel a great deal of stress simply because they are in a new and unfamiliar environment in which there is much important information to be learned.

• Ensuring new workers receive proper job training and orientation to the organization.

Increase Employees’ Sense of Control

• By giving workers a greater feeling of control through participation in work-related decisions, more responsibility or increased autonomy and independence, organization can alleviate some of this stress.

• Programs such as job enrichment, participative decision making and system of delegating authority.

Eliminate Punitive Management

• If organizations take steps to eliminate company policies that are perceived to be threatening or punitive, a major source of work stress will also be eliminated.

• Training supervisors to minimize the use of punishment as a managerial technique will also help to control this common source of stress.

Remove Hazardous or Dangerous Work Conditions

• In some occupations stress results from exposure to hazardous work conditions such as mechanical danger of loss of limb or life, health harming chemicals, excessive fatigue or extreme temperatures.

• The elimination or reduction of these situations is another way of coping with organizational stress.

Provide Supportive, Team-Oriented Work Environment

• There is a considerable research evidence that having supportive colleagues can help reduce worker stress.

• Meta-analyses suggest that social support in the workplace reduces perceptions of threat, lessens the perceived strength of the stressors and helps in coping with work-related stress.

Improve Communication

• Much of the stress at work derives from difficulties in interpersonal relations with supervisors and coworkers.

• The better the communication among workers, the lower the stress created because of misunderstandings.

• Stress occurs when workers feel cut off from or uninformed about organizational processes and operations.

Analogy

• Holding a glass of water:

  • Holding it for a minute: no problem.

  • Holding it for an hour: ache in your arm.

  • Holding it for a day: arm will feel numb and paralyzed.

  • The weight of the glass doesn't change, but the longer you hold it, the heavier it becomes.

• The stress & worries in life are like the glass of water.