11: Managing Stress & Emotions

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'):

1. Gross Domestic Product per capita (Investopedia, n.d.)

2. Social Support

3. Healthy life expectancy

4. Freedom to make life choices (autonomy)

5. Generosity

6. 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?"

• 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.