Category Archives: Stress
Shame on you!
Bohns and Flynn assert that guilt, as compared to shame, is a more adaptive affective reaction to setbacks in the workplace. In response to a setback or failure, an employee, among other things, can feel shame or can feel guilt. With shame, the person may continue to feel humiliated and take no practical steps to addressing the initial setback or failure, whereas with guilt, the person will be motivated to take some sort of corrective action. Further, under the assumption that people feel guilty when they feel that they have control over the negative outcome and that the negative outcome harmed others, the authors argue that in order to foster guilt and discourage shame, a business should create an environment in which there is a sense of autonomy, specific performance feedback, and outcome independence.
Burned Out? It Might Be Time to Look at Your Goals (IO Psychology)
Topic: Burnout, Stress, Goals
Publication: Journal of Applied Social Psychology
Article: The 2×2 model of goal orientation and burnout: The role of approach-avoidance dimensions in predicting burnout
Authors: Naidoo, L. J., DeCriscio, A., Bily, H., Manipella, A., Ryan, M., & Youdim, J.
Reviewer: Neil Morelli
There have been times when we’ve all felt a little burned out from work. When we feel burned out the usual suspects are situational factors like the job, occupation, organizational characteristics, leadership, and individual differences. But there is one variable that has typically been ignored in the literature—our motivational dispositions, or in other words, our goals.
Burnout is typically defined as having three components: emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced personal efficacy. Dispositional preferences, or our goal orientation for certain kinds of goals may, be linked to burnout because burnout is often viewed as environmental or work demands getting in the way of achieving our personal goals.
Naidoo et al. suggested thinking of goal orientation as being broken down into a 2×2 table. On the one side is mastery-orientation, the people who think they can improve and often set goals that are challenging or developmental; and performance-orientation, the people who think ability is fixed so they set goals that are attainable and not as challenging. The other side of the table is approach versus avoidance, or striving toward a goal out of anticipating its positive outcomes, or out of avoiding negative outcomes associated with failing to attain it.
Naidoo et al. gathered student responses to questions regarding goal pursuit and burnout measurement. Using structural modeling, the authors found that avoidance goal orientations were positively related to the three aspects of burnout and approach goal orientations were negatively related.
In light of conservation of resources theory, these findings suggest that people with avoidant goal orientations are more sensitive to resource loss (not reaching goals) and less likely to seek help when they fail. Whereas those with approach goal orientations may be more resilient to burnout inducing conditions.
What does all this mean? The authors suggest that to help reduce burnout, organizations and leaders that help the goals of their employees become more mastery-approach oriented could help them become more resilient to stressful conditions when it isn’t realistic to change the situation. This is a prudent suggestion for any leader who can help define goals for their team members or who can help determine the cultural norms of goal setting.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
Relax! You just had vacation! (IO Psychology)
Topic: Stress, Wellness
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (JUL 2012)
Article: Academics’ Experiences of a Respite From Work: Effects of Self-Critical Perfectionism and Perseverative Cognition on Postrespite Well-Being
Authors: Paul E. Flaxman, Julie Menard, Frank W. Bond, and Gail Kinman
Reviewed By: Isaac Sabat
For once, researchers and employees agree—it is absolutely necessary to take a vacation. If employees are not given breaks from work, they experience physical and mental fatigue, which puts them at risk for a variety of other more serious health problems. Vacations offer many important benefits to employees, such as the ability to recharge their batteries and increase their happiness. These effects have also been found to carry over into the subsequent work-weeks following vacations.
However, it has recently been found that not everybody is able to reap these same lingering benefits that vacations have to offer! If you are a self-critical perfectionist (i.e., somebody who sets overly high goals for him/herself and evaluates him/herself in an extremely critical manner), the data suggest that you will not properly enjoy your vacation. While self-critical perfectionists are able to relax and be as happy as non-perfectionists during the vacation period (possibly, because they are not engaged in activities that allow for self-criticism while on vacation), they almost immediately return to their pre-vacation stress-levels after returning to work!
Researchers found that this difference is caused by the tendency that many of these perfectionists share of ruminating about past errors and worrying about future errors. So, what does this mean for the self-critical perfectionists of the world? Well, they certainly shouldn’t worry about worrying too much. Researchers have proposed that the solution lies in mindfulness interventions that teach employees how to identify and reduce their anxiety-producing thoughts and stop repetitively worrying and ruminating about performance based tasks. As always, more research is needed to determine if these interventions could be effective.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
That It’s OK to Be Me: Authentic Leadership Drives Performance in Stressful Conditions (IO Psychology)
Topics: Leadership, Stress
Publication: The Leadership Quarterly (JUN 2012)
Article: The relationship between authentic leadership and follower job performance: The mediating role of follower positivity in extreme contexts.
Authors: Suzanne J. Peterson, Fred O. Walumbwa, Bruce J. Avolio, & Sean T. Hannah
Reviewed By: Aaron Manier
In stressful working environments, it’s good to know that your boss is a real, caring, genuine person who’s got your back in the toughest of situations. Not only does it seem like a good idea generally, but research is beginning to support the notion that authentic leaders, or leaders who are self-aware, moral, open, and objective, not only increase perceived support among followers, but drive higher performance in extreme and stressful working conditions.
Several key features of the authentic leader-follower relationship impact the strength of the relationship between authentic leadership and performance in extreme working conditions, specifically in police and military contexts. An authentic relationship between a leader and an employee creates a situation where employees can genuinely experience all of their emotions. The encouragement of authentic leaders for employees to feel their true emotions contradicts traditional thinking that emotions in extreme or stressful environments should be detached—a repressive, “tough it out” mentality. However, authenticity can lead to stronger positive emotions and improved performance.
Authentic leaders also create a working situation that activates employee’s psychological capital to drive improved performance. Psychological capital is like a pool of psychological resources that an employee can draw on to succeed, including confidence, strength of will, optimism, and resilience. By supporting employees and allowing them to develop this pool of psychological capital, authentic leaders empower employees to have the personal strength to confront stressful and potentially negative situations.
Given the impact that authentic leadership can have on performance and the work environment, organizations that operate in stressful or extreme conditions should consider switching their “tough it out” stance to one of support, genuineness, and a willingness to experience the challenges of a difficult work situation.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
Are you being treated badly by coworkers? It might just be affecting your home life (IO Psychology)
Topic: Counter-Productive Work Behavior, Work-Life Balance, Stress
Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior (MAY 2012)
Article: You cannot leave it at the office: Spillover and crossover of coworker incivility
Authors: M. Ferguson
Reviewed by: Alexandra Rechlin
Do you have a coworker who is rude to you? Ignores you? Is condescending to you? If so, that’s called coworker incivility and it is probably not only affecting your satisfaction with and performance at work, but also your home life.
In a recent study, Meredith Ferguson investigated if and how coworker incivility affects the marital satisfaction of both the target of workplace incivility and the target’s partner. She was also interested in the role that stress might play in the spillover effects from coworker incivility.
Ferguson collected data from 190 workers and their partners. She found that coworker incivility led to stress that transferred to the family domain; both the target and the target’s partner reported lower levels of marital satisfaction due to the extra stress. The target’s partner also experienced more family-to-work conflict, probably because the partner was taking on more responsibilities to help alleviate the stress of the target.
From an organizational perspective, several implications from this research should be noted. In addition to poor organizational outcomes (e.g., lower work satisfaction, absenteeism), coworker incivility can also lead to negative effects for the target’s home life. In turn, having work-to-family conflict can lead to family-to-work conflict; in other words, negative spillover from workplace incivility may spill back to the organization. Therefore, organizations should take coworker incivility seriously, explain unacceptable behavior, and actively discourage it. They also could provide employee assistance programs for employees who are suffering stress from coworker incivility so that spillover and negative outcomes are reduced.
human resource management, organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
When It Comes to Employee Health, More than an ‘Apple a Day’ is Needed (IO Psychology)
Topic: Health & Safety, Organizational Justice, Fairness, Burnout, Stress
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (2012)
Article: Perceived Unfairness and Employee Health: A Meta-Analytic Integration
Authors: Robbins, Jordan M.; Ford, Michael T.; Tetrick, Lois E.
Reviewed By: Lauren A. Wood, M.S.
Practitioners and employers alike have expressed concern around the effects of poor employee heath. When employees are not well, the organization can not only incurs costs due to direct medical expenses, but can also pay for poor employee health in the form of absenteeism, decreased productivity and moral, and even turnover.
Recent research has linked employee perceptions of organizational unfairness to employee health. There are four ways in which perceptions of unfairness are thought to be experienced. These are through feelings of distributive injustice (i.e., fairness of outcomes of decisions), procedural injustice (i.e., fairness of the process of the decisions), interactional injustice (i.e., fairness of the exchanges between individuals in the organization), and psychological contract breach (i.e., failure of the organization to live up to the expectations of the employee).
In general, perceived organizational unfairness was found to be associated with poor employee health indicators such as mental health conditions, physical health conditions, and number of absences. Moreover, unfairness was most strongly related to more proximal health indicators such as employee feelings of burnout, negative mood, and job related stress.
Additionally, the four types of unfairness were related to different health related indicators. For instance, procedural justice was more strongly related to physical health problem, while distributive justice was more predictive of mental health issues. Psychological contract breach was most strongly associated with employee perceptions of burnout. Of the four, interactional justice was the least predictive of the health indicators.
What can be done to promote employee health and well-being in the workplace?Well, one good thing is that perceptions of fairness are malleable aspects of the workplace, meaning that organizations have a great deal of control managing fairness (and unfairness) perceptions. To increase feeling of distributive justice, organizations should strive to make policies with outcomes that are the same for all employees regardless of gender, race, and tenure. While, increasing perceptions of procedural justice can be accomplished by insuring that decision-making processes treat all employees equally. Finally, to increase perceptions of a sturdy psychological contract, openly and clearly communicate to employees, provide them with information, direction, and support in times of change, and treat employees with respect.
source for picture: http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/images/Fruit_g104-Fresh_Apple_p36862.html
A Bad Boss Can Ruin Your Marriage
Topic: Conflict, Stress, Work-Life Balance, Workplace Deviance
Publication: Personnel Psychology
Article: The Fallout from Abusive Supervision: An Examination of Subordinates and Their Partners
Authors: Carson, D. S., Ferguson, M., Perrewé, P. L., & Whitten, D.
Reviewed By: Katie Bachman
Maybe this can be filed in the “Well, Duh” folder, but new research has shown that bad bosses can mess up your relationships at home. “What?,” you say, “stress from work means that I’m not my best at home?!” Yeah. If you are one of the unfortunate people to have an emotionally abusive supervisor (one that gets mad at you for no reason, belittles you in front of people, etc.), you can end up taking that stress home with you in the form of work-family conflict. To make matters worse, that conflict that you’re experiencing affects your spouse or significant other and makes them tense. Then, the snowball gets a little speed from your partner’s tension by affecting important family outcomes (like staying together). Bottom line: an abusive supervisor isn’t just a pain at work for you – you end up taking that negativity home with you, which hurts your family.
Bad bosses exist, so is there anything we, the supervised, can do about it? The authors of this article say that organizations and human resource departments should do what they can to stamp out abusive supervision (easy-peasy, right?). Beyond that, on the front lines, I think the best you can do is try to keep work and home stress separated. There’s no quick fix for this problem, but maybe just knowing that bad supervision spills over into your family’s lives can help you keep from passing on the bad mojo.
A Remedy for the “5 O’Clock Feeling”
Topic: Stress
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology (MAY 2011)
Article: The Effect of Positive Events at Work on After-Work Fatigue: They Matter Most in Face of Adversity
Authors: Gross, S., Semmer, N., Meier, L., Ka’lin, W., Jacobshagen, N., Tschan, F.
Reviewed By: Chelsea Rowe
No matter how rewarding or exhilarating the job, by the end of a workday, it’s not unusual to find oneself feeling a little spent. The more negative events that pop-up throughout the course of the day, the more exhausted we find ourselves as 5 o’clock approaches. Researchers have long shown that negative events use up our limited supply of cognitive resources. Depleted cognitive resources cause us to feel exhausted, diminish self-control, and make it difficult to complete taxing mental tasks or cope with tough situations. Positive and exciting moments, albeit more favorable to negative events, can still leave us pretty drained by the end of the day. However, little research has actually looked into how positive events affect our cognitive resources. Could it be that positive events also contribute to that “worn out” feeling or do they help to replenish our cognitive resources? Do they further exhaust us, or help us to recover from the day’s negative events?
Gross et al. (2011) asked government employees to keep several diaries, logging each day’s negative and positive experiences, and how fatigued or “spent” they felt by the end of the workday. The more negative events employees reported, the more fatigued they felt at the end of the day. Turns out that positive experiences may actually help us recover more quickly on the tough days, but only on the tough days. That is, positive events helped to replenish cognitive resources on days that were fraught with unpleasantness, but when the day wasn’t so bad, positive events did not have this protective effect. This held true whether the negative experiences were ongoing, chronic social stressors at the office (e.g., frequent conflict with colleagues, unfair treatment, etc.) or it was a one-thing-after-the-other day.
So when you see that frazzled colleague, shoot them a compliment. It doesn’t have to be related to what that person is stressed about, even if its not work-related. Demonstrate some empathy and let them know you care in some small way. Managers: this is a great opportunity to give some positive feedback. Research shows that helping to restore cognitive resources may improve performance and reduce the number of occupational accidents. So not only are you showing respect for your employees and shaping a positive work environment, you may also be boosting the bottom line. After all, there’s never a bad time to find yourself of the receiving end of a compliment.
Author’s Email: sven.gross@psy.unibe.ch
human resource management,organizational industrial psychology, organizational development
The Stress of Success: The Value of Time and Time Pressure
Topic: Stress, Human Resource Management
Publication: Journal of Applied Psychology
Article: Time is Tight: How Higher Economic Value of Time Increases Feelings of Time Pressure
Authors: DeVoe, S.E., & Pfeffer, J.
Reviewer: Neil Morelli
Do you feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day Like you’re always pressed for time? Well, you’re not alone. DeVoe and Pfeffer recently studied how the perception of time’s value can impact perceptions of time pressure-related work stress. They noted that it’s not just the number of hours or how we react to time pressure, but the economic value of our time that matters.
Turning the value to scarcity heuristic on its head, DeVoe and Pfeffer built upon the idea that the more valuable an object is the more scarce it appears. They specifically hypothesized that the economic value of time would be positively related to greater feelings of time pressure, that time value would be positively related to impatient behavior, and that these relationships would seem stronger when the monetary value of time was made salient.
These hypotheses were supported across a combination of 5 studies (1 longitudinal survey and 4 experimental), demonstrating that the higher the perceived value of time the greater the perception of time pressure. In other words, higher incomes, higher billable rates for time, and feeling richer (all proxies for having a perception of greater time value) were related to greater time pressure and less patient behavior.
These results may be one example of why more Americans seem to be pressed for time, even though the ratio of work to free time hasn’t changed in 5 decades. Thus, as societies begin to make more money, perceptions of time pressure and stress may increase as well. Though not a mandate for organizations to refuse proper compensation, these findings highlight how increased financial success can translate into increased time pressure-related stress.
human resource management,organizational industrial psychology, organizational management
Getting Emotional at Work
Topic: Stress, Change Management
Publication: Journal of Organizational Behavior (MAY 2011)
Article: Stability, change, and the stability of change in daily workplace affect
Authors: Beal, D. J., Ghandour, L.
Reviewed by: Larry Martinez
Have you ever noticed how some people are just more emotionally volatile than others? A coworker that comes to work happy as a clam one day and down in the dumps the next? Researchers call this affect spin, which refers to an individual characteristic that reflects the extent to which people experience more than one emotion over time. For example, in the picture above, each point represents one’s levels of positive and negative affect of any particular day (so four days in total). So, since the points fall all on different parts of the circumplex, the figure represents someone with high affect spin, or several varying emotions on different days. Beal and Ghandour (2001) examined this concept with positive and negative emotions and task motivation in the midst of a major natural disaster: Hurricane Ike.
These researchers examined several different aspects of emotional reactions. First, they found support for a weekly cyclical cycle such that emotions are most positive during the weekend and most negative around Wednesday. Also, for people who were high in affect spin there was a relationship between task motivation and positive emotions and motivation on one day influenced positive emotions next day. This was not the case for those low in affect spin. Finally, those high (but not those low) in affect spin experienced more negative emotions after Hurricane Ike than before.
So, the results show that most employees experience a predictable pattern of emotions throughout the week. In addition, some employees are more likely to have stable variability in the extent to which they oscillate between emotions over time, over and above the weekly cyclical pattern. Finally, some employees will recover emotionally from catastrophes than others. This information can inform workplace human resource management decisions.
