week 7: Stress management

Stress affects individual well-being and has the potential to affect the extent to which individuals and organizations achieve their goals and perform at a high level. Stress is bound up with workers’ personal lives; thus the study of stress also entails exploring the nature of work-life linkages.

People experience stress when they fact opportunities or threats that they perceive as important and also perceive they might not be able to handle or deal with effectively. An opportunity is something that has the potential to benefit a person. A threat is something that has the potential to harm a person. Stress is a highly personal experience influenced by an individual’s personality, abilities, and perceptions; what is stressful for one person might not be stressful for another.

Stress can have physiological, psychological, and behavioral consequences. The relationship between stress and physiological consequences is complicated, and the most serious physiological consequences (for example, cardiovascular disease and heart attack) result only after considerably high levels of stress have been experienced for a prolonged period of time. Psychological consequences of stress include negative feelings, moods, and emotions; negative attitudes; and burnout. Potential behavioral consequences of stress include job performance, strained interpersonal relations, absenteeism, and turnover. Workers who are responsible for helping others sometimes experience burnout. The three key signs of burnout are feelings of low personal accomplishment, emotional exhaustion, and depersonalization. 

A certain level of stress is positive in that it can result in high levels of job performance. When stress levels are excessively high, negative stress is experienced, and performance suffers. Other potential behavioral consequences of high stress include strained interpersonal relations, absenteeism, and turnover.

Some problemfocused coping strategies that organizations can use are job redesign and rotation, reduction of uncertainty, job security, company day care, flexible work schedules and job sharing, and telecommuting. Some emotion-focused coping strategies for organizations are on-site exercise facilities, personal days and sabbaticals, organizational support, and employee assistance programs.

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