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Stress Management

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42 views28 pages

Stress Management

Uploaded by

theeeclipse17
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Stress Management

Dr. Fredrick Aila


Department of Business Administration, Maseno University

1
Problems of Work Adjustment

How do you recognize the symptoms of stress in yourself and in others?

● Failure to adjust to work represents a major problem in industry today.


○ Turnover,
○ absenteeism,
○ drug abuse,
○ alcoholism, and
○ sabotage

2
Five types of people who have problems adjusting to work.

● Type I: People who lack motivation to work.


● Type II: People whose predominating response to the demand to be productive is fear or
anxiety.
● Type III: People who are characterized predominantly by open hostility and aggression.
● Type IV: People who are characterized by marked dependency.
● Type V: People who display a marked degree of social naïveté.

W. S. Neff, Work and Human Behavior (New York: Atherton, 1968), p. 208.
3
Work-Related Stress

Physical and emotional reaction to


potentially threatening aspects of the
environment

4
Work-Related Stress

● Stress is pervasive in the work environment


● all people do not react in the same way to stressful situations, even in
the same occupation
● all stress is not necessarily bad

J. McGrath, “Stress and Behavior in Organizations,” in M. D. Dunnette, ed.,


Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1976).
5
General Adaptation Syndrome

A three stage process:

● alarm, occurs at the first sign of stress


● resistance, the body attempts to repair any damage and return to a condition of
stability and equilibrium
● exhaustion, defenses wear away, and the individual experiences a variety of
stress-related illnesses, including headaches, ulcers, and high blood pressure

H. Selye, The Stress of Life (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956).

6
Types of Stress: Frustration and Anxiety

● Frustration refers to a psychological reaction to an obstruction or impediment


to goal-oriented behavior.
○ Give examples of people experiencing obstacles that lead to frustration
● Anxiety is a feeling of inability to deal with anticipated harm
○ Occurs when people do not have appropriate responses or plans for
coping with anticipated problems
○ Give your examples

7
What causes anxiety in work organizations?

● Differences in power in organizations


● Frequent changes in organizations
● Job ambiguity (especially when it is coupled with pressure).
● Lack of job feedback
● Volatility in the organization’s economic environment
● Job insecurity
● High visibility of one’s performance (successes as well as failures).

W. C. Hamner and D. Organ, Organizational Behavior (Dallas: BPI, 1978), p. 202.


8
Other Factors:
personal/nonrganisational factors
● physical illness,
● problems at home,
● unrealistically high personal goals, and
● estrangement from one’s colleagues or one’s peer
group
W. C. Hamner and D. Organ, Organizational Behavior (Dallas: BPI, 1978), p. 202.
9
Organizational Influences on Stress

Major Influences on Job-Related Stress

1) occupational differences,

(2) role ambiguity,

(3) role conflict, and

(4) role overload and underutilization .

10
Occupational Differences

● Tension and job stress are prevalent in our contemporary society and can be found in a
wide variety of jobs
● Typical stressors faced by managers
○ Role ambiguity
○ Role conflicts
○ Role overload
○ Unrealistic expectations
○ Difficult decisions
○ Managerial failure
○ Subordinate failure
11
Role Ambiguity

● When individuals have inadequate information concerning their roles


○ Where is this most experienced within the organisation?
● Negative stress-related outcomes of role ambiguity:
○ produces psychological strain and dissatisfaction;
○ leads to underutilization of human resources; and
○ leads to feelings of futility on how to cope with the organizational
environment

12
Role Conflict

● Simultaneous occurrence of two (or more) sets of pressures or expectations;


compliance with one would make it difficult to comply with the other
● Contradictory role expectations give rise to opposing role pressures (role
conflict)
● The presence of conflict in one’s role tends to undermine her reactions with
her role senders and to produce weaker bonds of trust, respect, and attraction

13
Role Overload and Underutilization

● Role overload-the extent to which employees feel either overloaded or


underutilized in their job responsibilities
● Quantitative overload consists of having more work than can be done
in a given time period
● Qualitative role overload, on the other hand, consists of being taxed
beyond one’s skills, abilities, and knowledge

14
Role Underutilisation

● Role underutilization occurs when employees are allowed to use


only a few of their skills and abilities, even though they are
required to make heavy use of them
● Describe the Underload-Overload Continuum (Source: Adapted from
Organizations: Behavior, Structure, Processes 14th edition by James L. Gibson, John M.
Ivancevich, and Robert Konopaske, McGraw Hill, 2013. (Attribution: Copyright Rice University,
OpenStax, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license))

15
Personal Influences on Stress

(1) personal control,


(2) Type A personality, and
(3) rate of life change
1. How does one shift from Type A to B?
2. How might a manager slow the rate of life change?
16
How do managers and organizations minimize the dysfunctional
consequences of stressful behavior?

● Social Support: the extent to which organization members feel their peers can be trusted,

are interested in one another’s welfare, respect one another, and have a genuine positive
regard for one another
● Hardiness: Hardiness represents a collection of personality characteristics that involve
one’s ability to perceptually or behaviorally transform negative stressors into positive
challenges

17
Consequences of Work Related Stress

Three intensity levels of stress—


● no stress,
● low stress, and
● high stress

18
Four major categories of outcomes/consequences

(1) stress and health,

(2) stress and counterproductive behavior,

(3) stress and job performance, and

(4) stress and burnout.

19
Stress and health

● High degrees of stress are typically accompanied by severe


anxiety and/or frustration, high blood pressure, and high
cholesterol levels
● High job stress contributes to a variety of other ailments,
including peptic ulcers, arthritis, and several forms of mental
illness

20
Mental health of industrial workers

● Job satisfaction varied consistently with employee skill levels. Blue-collar workers holding high-
level jobs exhibited better mental health than those holding low-level jobs.
● Job dissatisfaction, stress, and absenteeism were all related directly to the characteristics of the job.
Dull, repetitious, unchallenging jobs were associated with the poorest mental health.
● Feelings of helplessness, withdrawal, alienation, and pessimism were widespread throughout the
plant. As an example, Kornhauser noted that 50 percent of the assembly-line workers felt they had
little influence over the future course of their lives; this compares to only 17 percent for nonfactory
workers.
● Employees with the lowest mental health also tended to be more passive in their nonwork activities;
typically, they did not vote or take part in community activities.
A. Kornhauser, Mental Health and the Industrial Worker (New York: Wiley, 1965).
21
Stress and Counterproductive Behavior

● Turnover and Absenteeism


● Alcoholism and Drug Abuse
● Aggression and Sabotage

22
Stress and Job Performance

The inverted J-curve

23
Stress and Burnout

Burnout is a general feeling of exhaustion that can develop when a


person simultaneously experiences too much pressure to perform
and too few sources of satisfaction

24
Characteristics leading to burnout

● idealistic and self-motivated achievers,


● seeking unattainable goals,
● having few buffers against stress

25
Coping with work related stress
Individual Strategies

● Developing Self-Awareness
● Developing Outside Interests
● Leaving the Organization
● Finding a Personal or Unique Solution
● Physical Exercise
● Cognitive Perspective

26
Organizational Strategies

● Personnel Selection and Placement


● Skills Training
● Job Redesign
● Company-Sponsored Counseling Programs
● Increased Participation and Personal Control
● Work Group Cohesiveness.
● Improved Communication
● Health Promotion Programs

27
Source
Organizational Behavior by
https://opentextbc.ca/organizationalbehavioropenstax/chapter/introduction-18/
OpenStax is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except
where otherwise noted.

Dr. Fredrick Aila (2020) CC-BY

28

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