Did you know that there is a World Happiness Day? I only bring it up because when I think stress, I also think about happiness. Happiness and stress are not mutually exclusive states, in fact what are generally considered to be positive events (e.g. getting married) are not distinguished from negative events when included in Stress Inventories (i.e. Holmes & Rahe, 1967).
There's also a yearly World Happiness Report (United Nations, 2016) that gets released, too. Many of the factors they use to calculate the happiness of a country will make sense to you based on previous lessons in this class (FYI: researchers generally conceptualize the term happiness as 'subjective well-being'):
Gross Domestic Product per capita (Investopedia, n.d.)
Social Support
Healthy life expectancy
Freedom to make life choices (autonomy)
Generosity
Perceptions of Corruption
Based on your advanced understanding of motivation and universal human needs which you developed a while back, you can probably easily map these onto the appropriate levels of The New Pyramid of Needs (Kenrick, 2010 as cited in Brown, 2016).
Why am I leading with this in our lesson on stress?? Well, I got into I-O to make the world a better place, so what makes the world happier matters to how we design work. Happier people do work better, though we tend to study job satisfaction at work more than we actually focus on well-being. My question always is, "How can we support these factors via work/employment?"
Stress is complicated, so I'm going to keep it simple. Your textbook does a good job of introducing what you really need to know on these two topics and how they connect - I just want to point out a few things and connections to our previous material.
It’s stress if you (1) have a physical response, (2) you’d avoid it, and you (3) feel out of control.
Stress is defined in terms of its effects on a person, and can be mental, physical, and/or emotional strain. Stress generally occurs due to a demand that exceeds the individual's coping ability (Nagle, n.d.).
Workplace stress can generally fall into one of the following 4 categories:
Task Demands
Role Demands
Interpersonal Demands
Physical Demands
Work-life balance issues can cause stress as well (and usually do): In fact, if a person is preoccupied with providing for their or their family's Universal Human Needs of their family (food, shelter, healthcare, etc.) they will be constantly compromised or distracted at work (The Week Staff, 2013). This is one of the main arguments in favor of all companies needing to offer a living wage (though there are of course counter arguments I am not addressing here). ALL efforts to reduce work stress mean nothing until people have their basic needs taken care of. Without doing that you get a workforce whose productivity is constantly operating below peak which no intervention or work effort can improve to achieve peak performance (Scmitt, 2012).*
Stereotype Threat & Microaggressions = Increased Stress. Certain individuals who are subject to stereotypes often experience increased stress as well based on their feelings of threat based on their identity (e.g. LGBTQ, gender, race, disabled, disadvantaged, etc.). In addition things like the current issues around immigration can cause immense external stress for those who are affected personally (ReducingStereotypeThreat.org, n.d.).
Environments and contexts can be stress sources too - even if they are only changing and are not necessarily 'bad'. Economic (e.g. potential or actual company layoffs), environmental (e.g. recession), and organizational (e.g. rigid structure) have been linked to increased stress levels if they are perceived as a ‘threat’ or even just a change (our body tends to treat all stress the same, whether good or bad, and interprets change as a need for a stress response usually). This is in part why places like Google and Facebook build campuses for their workers, it insulates them from their surroundings.
Stress and strain are not necessarily bad (there's a sweet spot).
Stressed brains act and learn differently. Moderate stress begins to lower performance, while severe long-term stress cripples the brain which negatively affects the body as well. However, mild stress (like the pressure of a deadline if you’ve procrastinated) actually propels us into a sweet spot where cognition improves. That’s why some people seem to get addicted to procrastinating. How this works is known as the Yerkes-Dodson Law or the Stress Response Curve/Inverted U Model - you can explore these concepts on MindTools or Explorable.
Balancing pressure and performance at work. Work stress is rarely life or death, but chronic stress will affect us the same no matter where or why it happens. You want to limit the windows of actual stress for your employees if you can, and instead provide challenges that will drive them to their peak without pushing them over whenever possible.
Org./Job Stress has been known to cost U.S. industry over $300 billion annually as a result (World Health Organization, 2005) - the main negative consequences are in the two images below.
You're not required to use any of these as part of your plan, but you may find them helpful, especially for finding out how stressed you are right now according to scientific scales.
Social Readjustment Rating Scale (Holmes & Rahe, 1967) - Identifies major stressful life events and likelihood of physical effects, here's a bit more info. on this scale, and a little more if you need it.
Other Self Assessments - Look at the bottom to find a link to a downloadable version of the Perceived Stress Scale (Cohen, 1994) which is widely used in organizational research.
References
Driskell, J. E., Salas, E., & Johnston, J. (1999). Does stress lead to a loss of team perspective? Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice, 3(4), 291-302. Retrieved from http://iims.uthscsa.edu/sites/iims/files/TeamProcess-5.pdf
Maxon, R. (1999). Stress in the Workplace: A Costly Epidemic. Retrieved from FDU Magazine: http://www.fdu.edu/newspubs/magazine/99su/stress.html
Medina, J. (2014, October 1). Retrieved from Brain Rules by John Medina: http://brainrules.net/
Nagle, A. P. K. (n.d.). Organizational behavior. 7.2 What Is Stress? | Organizational Behavior. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-orgbehavior/chapter/7-2-what-is-stress/
ReducingStereotypeThreat.org. (n.d.). What is stereotype threat? Retrieved from ReducingStereotypeThreat.org: http://www.reducingstereotypethreat.org/definition.html
Scmitt, J. (2012, March). The Minimum Wage is too Damn Low. Center for Economic and Policy Research Issue Brief.
Sustainable Development Solutions Network. (2016, March 16). World Happiness Report 2016 update ranks happiest countries. Retrieved from http://worldhappiness.report/news/2016/03/16/world-happiness-report-2016-update-ranks-happiest-countries/
The Week Staff. (2013, February 2). Working, but still poor. Retrieved from The Week: http://theweek.com/article/index/239499/working-but-still-poor
World Health Organization. (2005). Work Organization and Stress. Retrieved from World Health Organization Occupational Health: http://www.who.int/occupational_health/publications/pwh3rev.pdf
Lumen Learning (Organizational Behavior) & Mindtools both feature some excellent starter information to consider if you need to reduce workplace stress.
🎧 Try Harvard Business Review's IdeaCasts (you can click RSS then use Ctrl+F to search all episodes easier). For this lesson #106 The Importance of Urgency and #451 Be Less Reactive and More Proactive are relevant for both our OB topics and your self-management.
🎬 Watch a relevant TED Talk. For this lesson I recommend:
Mcgonigal, K. (2013, June). "How to make stress your friend''". [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend
Gilbert, D. (2004, February). "The surprising science of happiness". [Video File]. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy