*An Historical Information
*Different Reasons of Stress
*Four Types of Stress
*Role Stress
*What is the Effect of Stress to the Workforces?
*How Managers can Identify Stress?
*How Managers can Reduce Stress Levels?
*Tesco Portsmouth Branch Customer Service Manager
Stress plays an important part in our lives and without it we should not be who we are, therefore it is important to appreciate the benefits of constructive or positive stress and to recognise the possible harmful effects of destructive or negative stress.
Many now realize that to effectively deal with stress in the workplace, managers are the first line of prevention. The illnesses created by stress and work environment stressors are a significant cause for managerial concern and alarm.
Stress is that effective in our lives that, when I got the coursework topics I chose this one immediately. I did quite a lot research in this area and made an interview with the Tesco Portsmouth Branch Customer Service Manager, who is responsible for 150 employees, to make this assignment different.
Being a professional manager is one of the ideals in my life. As such, I help myself to broaden my knowledge in the undertaking of this coursework. This coursework was very useful for me that, I can define this as:
Stress is a word derived from the Latin word ‘stringere’, meaning to draw tight and was used in the seventeenth century to describe hardships or affliction. During the late eighteenth century, stress denoted ‘force, pressure, strain or strong effort’, referring primarily to an individual or to the individual’s organs or mental powers.
There are many definitions of stress and I have chosen the following description in order to identify a starting point. Where are we coming from !
A STRESSFUL CIRCUMSTANCE IS ONE WITH WHICH YOU CANNOT COPE SUCCESSFULLY, OR BELIEVE YOU CANNOT COPE SUCCESSFULLY AND WHICH RESULTS IN UNWANTED PHYSICAL, MENTAL OR EMOTIONAL REACTIONS.
Historical information:’Analysis Organizational Behavior’ Mike SMITH p.197-198Stress is caused as a result of the interaction between the demands of the situation and the individual’s ability to meet those demands, that is, where there is a lack of ‘fit’ the stress results.
A stressor is the object/ area/ person/ situation that causes the stress levels to be raised. We all react differently in given situations dependent on our present state of health, our past experiences, learned behavior from family, school etc., and many other aspects you can probably think of that influence the individual.
I set up some major important factors that cause stress in order as follows:
The job, including working conditions, and work load; aspects of the role, including role ambiguity, role conflict and colleagues. Career development, such as job security, promotion, and mid-life crisis; organizational structure and climate as it affects personal autonomy, freedom to influence decisions, participation and quality of working life. In addition, there are extra organizational sources of stress which include: family, life crisis, marriage, dual career partners and job mobility.
For the individual in the organizations, there are five situations that create role problems and therefore stress;
1) Responsibility for the work of others
2) Relationship problems
3) Innovative functions
4) Career uncertainty
5) Integrative or boundary functions
And these are the major causes of work-related stress shown in the table, next page, . Most of them are written above but I wanted to show them in a table like this:
Major Causes of Work-Related Stress:
Job: Work overload, Role conflict and ambiguity, Responsibility for people Career goal discrepancy, Short lead times, Too many meetings
Work Group: Lack of cohesiveness, Intragroup conflict, Group dissatisfaction Status incongruence, Staff shortages
Organizational: Climate, Technology, Management styles, Organizational design, Control systems, Interunit conflict
Physical Environment: Light,Noise, Temperature, Vibration and motion, Polluted air
Table belongs to:’Organizational Behaviour and the Practice of Management’ David R. Hampton p.77Karl Albrecht identifies four types of stress:
1) Time stress: The feeling that there is not enough time available to do the things one has to do.
2) Situational stress: Role stress in its various forms, sometimes accentuated by the personalities or actors involved in a particular situation.
3) Anticipatory stress: Commonly called ‘’worry’’. This is the feeling that some unknown disaster is about to happen.
4) Encounter stress: The anxiety about dealing with one or more people whom one finds difficult, unpleasant or possibly unpredictable or the kind of mild panic that comes when the conventional rules of social behaviour no longer seem to apply.
However, not all persons react to these types in the same way. And I decided to put ‘Role Stress’ under this title because I think it is another different type of stress that can be seen in the organizations.
Role Stress
Role ambiguity, incompatibility, conflict, overload and underload lead to role stress. One of the major tasks of management in organizations is to control the level of stress. Beneficial stress is role pressure, harmful stress is role strain.
Symptoms of Role Strain
* Tension: Irritation, excessive preoccupation with trivia, great attention to precision or periods of sickness.
* Low morale: Often expressed as low confidence in the organization expression of dissatisfaction with the job.
* Communication difficulties: The individual is hard to talk with or even breaks off communication entirely.
There are several ways of dealing with role strain and any type of stress, I will talk about them later.
This part is the main part of my assignment. Because the topic is related to managers. And I have decided to divide this main part into three titles. These are;
A) What is the Effect of Stress to the Workforces?
B) How Managers can Identify Stress?
C) How Managers can Reduce Stress Levels?
A) What is the Effect of Stress to the Workforces?
In some organizations, highly intelligent, well-trained, motivated, well-informed and non-stressed individuals produce great results. In this position we have to see the benefits and harmful effects of stress.
Today in many organizations, managers are more sensitive to potential stressors in order to maintain productive, involved employees. Managers and employees must recognize that a certain amount of stress may be necessary for creative and productive work. A total absence of stress in the workforces can result incomplacency. It is important for the organization to choose people for inherently stressful roles who will be able to tolerate stress.
The paragraph above is benefit of stress. All we know that it has got more negative effects than the benefits.
In stress situations individuals generally go through three stages
1- Alarm 2- Resistance 3- Exhaustion
Exhaustion includes problems of waking up in the morning and extreme fatigue in the evening. And some health problems are caused of stress such as:
Depression, including nervousness and anxiety, eyestrain, headaches, pains in the arms and shoulders, repetitive strain injury and other muscular pains.
These health problems directly affects individuals and reduce their productivity for the workplaces. Shortly, organizations are suffer indirectly because of symptoms of stress that changes the individual. Also I wrote some results that changes the individual because of role strain in the title of Types of Stress.
Recently courts have indicated that an employer is legally liable for an employee’s mental illness, and there are a few cases supporting this. The manager is responsible in the organization to the increase in these claims. If managers are unwilling to recognize stress symptoms then they are taking the risk of possibility increasing legal actions. This legal action is the direct effect of stress to the workforces.
And costs of stress are high. One study of an organization with 2000 employees and gross sales of $60 million per year estimated that stress related factors cost the organization $1780 each employee per year.
Source of cost:’A Diagnostic Approach to Organizational Behaviour’ Judith R. Gordon p.190B) How Managers can Identify Stress?
One of a manager’s most important functions in helping employees deal with stress is to recognize stress related problems. Most managers would be hard to recognize physiological reactions or signs of stress. These signs of being stressed are what managers need to be trained to recognize. If a few of signs exist, it does not mean that this employee has got a stress problem. However, an increase in the number of signs a person displays, with a growing frequency and intensity can show exactly a stress problem. If the manager can recognize stress symptoms accurately, then the manager played an invaluable role in helping the person and organization to manage stress.
There are different ways of identifying stress symptoms. Firstly, training manager in stress symptom identification is an important step to cope with it. But what does the manager need to know? As a starting point, the problems or stressors must be identified. The manager’s recognition of the problem requires other information as well. Three procedures generally considered appropriate for managers to acquire a realistic picture are;
1. Face to face conversation 2. Observation 3. Self report surveys
The questions below can be asked by the manager to the stressful employee during the face to face conversation:
* How does the individual characteristically behave and perform?
* What are the excesses and deficits shown by the employee?
* What are the stress symptoms that I observe? Are these true?
* Has the employee effectively coped with stress in the past? How?
* What has happened around work that could trigger a severe stress reaction? Is that what the employee is stressed about?
* If the individual is not stressed about the work what is the employee stressed about? How can I help to fight against the stress which is caused out of work?
* Is there any medical or physical problem? How sure I am?
* Does this employee have a long-standing personality that was noted long before these symptoms occurred?
* Are there resources available to help reduce the symptoms?
* Is the employee helping me to get rid of stress or he/she does not care about that?
* What is the solution for this employee?
Some questions are from:’A Diagnostic Approach to Organizational Behaviour’ Judith R. Gordon p.191After asking these questions and taking the answers, the manager should have a general explanation of the individual’s stress symptoms. The aim of the question and answer process is to work the creation of a better fit between the individual and the organization.
Also direct observation of the employee’s stress symptoms is another important procedures of acquiring a realistic picture of the individual environment interaction. A trained manager can make detailed observations periodically at work.
As I wrote before, a well designed, formal, structure training program can be an effective way to decrease stress level. The features of such programs are to improve knowledge, awareness and symptom identification skills. These training programs includes;
Explain; the current judicial trend in stress illness lawsuits
Describe; stress reactions in terms of affective, cognitive, biological and other responses
Identify; factors that account for individual differences an employee responses to stress
Outline; the manager’s role in recognizing stress symptoms and what these symptoms are
Learn; how to conduct face to face conversation, observation and self report procedures to acquire knowledge about stress symptoms.
C) How Managers can Reduce Stress Levels?
Managers, as a social duty, must manage stress not court it. Effective organizational members must recognize when to increase and when to decrease stress. Managers can encourage productive stress. They can help employees build challenge into their work and autonomy over time.
But first step in stress reduction is understanding the sources of managerial pressure. And there are many ways to reduce stress levels at work. Let me give you some common ways:
1) To recreate the organizational environment in the workplace to have social and psychological influence upon the employees. This is going to make greater autonomy and participation in their jobs.
2) To create an organizational climate to encourage communication, open-ness and trust -so that individual managers are able to express their mobility to cope, their work related fears and are able to ask for help if needed.
3) To begin to build the bridges between the home and the workplace; giving opportunities for both the manager’s wife and employees wife's to understand her husband’s job better. And all the family members should be involved in the decision making processes of work that affects all of them.
4) To utilize the well developed catalogue of social interactive skill training programmes to help clarify role and interpersonal relationship difficulties within organizations.
There are many other methods and approaches of coping and managing stress, depending on the sources activated and the interface between these sources and the individual make-up of the manager concerned. For example there are three ways of dealing with role strain;
a) Repression: The individual refuses to admit that there is any problem, although all the symptoms are there.
b) Withdrawal: The individual retreats behind a psychological barrier, or leaves the organization.
c) Rationalization: The individual decides that the conflict is inevitable and that he must live with it.
Managers can also help individuals cope with dysfunctional stress in three basic ways. Many organizations provide free employee health and counseling services as well as stress reduction workshops to help individuals deal with symptoms. Second, stress reduction activities can be directed to changing the person, by improving resistance to stress through yoga, exercise, diet or psychological support. Third, individuals and organizations can change or remove the stressors; they can redesign jobs to reduce role overload, role ambiguity or conversely, boredom. They can also change organizational policies to give individuals more control over their work activities that this is very important.
Also managers can help individuals by encouraging adaptive behaviours. They can take some work off overworked employees, encourage an employee who has a poor working relationship with a colleague to confront him or her and clarify ambiguous roles. Managers can simultaneously discourage maladaptive behaviours. They can discourage overworked employees from accepting additional work, discourage employees with poor relationships with colleagues from avoiding or attacking them or prevent workers from withdrawing from ambiguous role.
On 11th of April, I went to Tesco Portsmouth Branch and made an interview with the Customer Service Manager, whose name is Stephen BARBOUR, about stress and stress management. Staff Manager was not able to talk with me on that day. I was happy because Mr. BARBOUR is responsible for 150 employees and gave me enough information. Here is our conversation:
Q: Question A: Answer
Q: How many employees is working in this branch of Tesco? And for how many of them are you responsible for?
A: As total 350 employees are working and I am responsible for approximately 140-150 of them.
Q: How can you describe stress?
A: Stress can be described in a number of ways. It depends, everyone reacts stress in a different way. It is reaction to the situation, some people are coming irritable, some people find the job too much for themselves. And other people take exactly the opposite approach, they don’t become irritable they lay up the same situation. I can say that stress is reaction to the situation and differs for everyone.
Q: How do you understand this employee is stressful?
A: You work with them and see what they like day to day. The change in their behaviour indicates whether they are under stress. If you see somebody becomes irritable and work goes down you might put them understressed. If they have family problems they bring this to work, like everyone, and you can understand it easily.
Q: What do you do generally to reduce stress level?
A: We are using the doctrine of ‘behaviour breeds behaviour’. Basically the behaviour of the management would be reflected through the staff. If I came to work uptight everyday, the managers working for me will be quickly become uptight and the staff working for my managers will become uptight. Behaviour breeds behaviour, manager’s behaviours will affect staff and vice versa. The best way to reduce stress levels in the store is to remain basically stress free yourself and if you are stressed than you don’t put that through anyone you just keep with you and deal by yourself.
Q: Do you have any programme or medical care for stressful employees?
A: Yes the main office has got one.
Q: You know stress costs too much to the organizations. How much did it cost you last year do you know?
A: I have no idea because Occupational Health is dealing with that. And every year they are publishing those costs and some other useful information.
Q: If you understand this employee is very stressful what will be the first thing that you will make for him/her?
A: If that person is stressed then the best thing is sit down for a coffee and discuss and talk about it. Find out the causes of stress and then try to minimise these stressors. If sometimes it is out of work which I cannot deal with it, they have to deal with themselves via their doctors, via the Occupational Health Department. But if the stress is exactly about the work I sit down and deal with it simply by discussing.
Q: Personally, what are you doing to escape from stress?
A: I do not get stress. And if I get it, I will keep it myself and leave at home. As I said before behaviour breeds behaviour if I come here stressed then my staff will be stressed.
Q: Do you know management is one of the most stressful jobs. You help employees to decrease their stress levels, is there someone helping to you?
A: I think that is a personal question and I do not know how everyone is dealing with their stress. If I am stressed my family will help me or my boss. I will go and see my boss and tell this causes stress to me. But I do not suffer from stress. And I am sure Occupational Health Department is always ready to help all the workers of Tesco.
Q: That’s all. Thank you very much for giving us your time and have luck in your work.
A: You are welcome.
This report could not have been produced on behalf of the following people who I wish to thank.
Firstly I would like to thank Stephen BARBOUR who I interviewed and offered me his valuable time.
Secondly, I would like to thank Ray FRENCH, who is my lecturer in Introduction to Organizational Behaviour. Whenever I visited him he always was ready to answer any quiries and questions that I had for him regarding this piece of coursework. The maximum length of this piece of coursework was supposed to be two thousand five hundred but Mr FRENCH agreed for me to submit a larger piece of work.
Finally I would like to thank my contact at American Express Mr KULAR who supplied me with American Express Stress Management documentation.
* ‘The Psychology of Behaviour in Organization’ Elizabeth CHELL Second Edition, The Macmillan Press Ltd.
* ‘Analysing Organizational Behaviours’ Mike SMITH First Edition, The Macmillan Press Ltd.
* ‘Organizational Behaviour’ Adrzej HUCZYNSKI and David BUCHANAN Second Edition, Prentice Hall
* ‘Organizational Behaviour and the Practice of Management’ David R. HAMPTON, Charles E. SUMMER, and Ross A. WEBBER Fifth Edition, Scott,Foresman and Company
* AMERICAN EXPRESS Stress Management Programme Year 1995-1996
* Lecture Handouts
