Although the importance of people’s differences can’t be ignored, scientific evidence suggests that certain working conditions are stressful to most people. The role a person has in an organisation dictates the amount of stress they will face. Such evidence argues that certain working conditions are the key source of job stress. A role can be defined as “the set of expectations that others have of a role incumbent’s behaviour”2 (Fincham and Rhodes, 2001). Here are some situations in which roles in organisations become stressful:
- Role ambiguity: This is where a person doesn’t receive enough information, and therefore can’t perform to the best of their abilities as they haven’t been given the proper procedures etc to carry out the duty. Also these people aren’t totally clear on what to expect from them. The people who aren’t giving enough information can vary from a manager to customers. A number of studies have shown that role ambiguity does reduce the commitment a person puts into their job, and job satisfaction among others. Role ambiguity makes a person want to leave the organisation it also increases tension and anxiety in a person (Fisher and Gritelson, 1983). Role ambiguity will become bigger and bigger as a person takes on more roles and is under more and more pressure. This can be solved by giving standard operating procedures in certain situations so a person knows what to do in these circumstances. Also there needs to be more interaction between the employee and their supervisor or manager.
- Boundary spanning roles: these roles involve a person taking the functions of the business outside into the wider world, a bit like door-to-door selling. These roles tend to carry a higher then normal level of stress. This involves the leadership of the company pushing for harder and harder targets without taking into account problems that can arise from the outside environment. The management of the company in these cases don’t realise the difficulty in building relationships with the clients/customers and the difficulties that they can face while doing this. This targeting and performance analysis puts a lot of pressure on the employee who has to push themselves harder and harder. This can be solved by allowing the management to see the situations the employees can face at certain times and allow for more reasonable targets and not push too hard on performance levels.
- Work role transitions: This is when a person goes to a new job and is faced with an unfamiliar situation where they don’t know anybody. This type stress affects a person more when the person enters a newly created job where there isn’t anyone who did the job before to give them any advice or guidance. This type of stress is quite common as people are always starting new jobs. Not all people find these situations stressful some find these situations as an opportunity to progress. These situations are quite hard to solve as the people will always enter new jobs but this can be better solved pushing other employee to socialise more with the new employee so they feel more comfortable in this new environment. If the employee feels more secure in the environment then they will feel less stress.
- Burnout: This type of stress is caused by people feel like they are in a dead end job where there is little or no chance of promotion. This is the case in some large organisations where there has recently been a shake up of the management or if it has recently been created. It creates new roles which are filled up by young qualified people, after these roles are filled up by the young people there is a small chance anyone lower down will get a promotion for a long time causing them to feel stressed. It was originally seen in nursing roles and other jobs like that. Burnout causes a person to feel emotionally exhausted and have a lack of energy. There are ways in which an organisation can solve this feeling of being locked into a role, they can negotiate career plans which a person doesn’t just progress up they also have sideways promotions. They can also set up project teams which allow new responsibility and authority so more people can progress up to a position where they feel less stressed.
- Single role conflict: This is when parts of a person’s job become hard to resolve. Especially when a person has recently been promoted to supervisor of the team they used to be part of. It occurs when the management have expectations opposing the team’s expectations. The supervisor would allow the team more lenience on issues such as lateness and the amount of output to be produced but the management would want them to tighten up on these issues. This is normally solved by the supervisor returning to their previous position, but it may also be resolved by making the supervisor switch places with a supervisor on another team so they won’t be as sympathetic.
- Multiple role conflict: This type of stress is mainly about the person filling two roles in life, which have differing demands and clash. It is commonly when family life and work life clashes. It can also happen in a work place when a manager takes on another role, like if a manager is also the pharmacist in a pharmacy, the roles may conflict in their demands. It is said that multiple role conflict is inevitable to some extent as people will fill more then one role as their family life is normally different to their working life, and this may conflict in some cases.
The amount of stimulation a job gives a person can be associated with the amount of stress it causes them. There are two ways in which it could affect an employee. The first is over stimulation, which is where a person works long hours and has a large workload. This can cause depression and make the employee have a low self-esteem, also causing them to consume more and more alcohol and cigarettes in an attempt to reduce the stress which will make it worse. This can be solved by limiting the amount of hours a person can work and giving them less to do or give them more help doing it, so they don’t have to work so hard. The second is under stimulation which is when a job is very boring, very repetitive and doesn’t allow the employee to use their true ability and skills, for example in a factory. This causes boredom and reduces a person’s motivation. This can be solved by making the employee switch their roles every once a while so they can do different things and be more stimulated.
The uncertainty in a job has been seen as the cause of a lot of occupational stress. People try and make decisions to reduce this uncertainty but making these decisions causes stress as well, according to Fincham and Rhodes “In the process, (of making decisions) individuals may experience an acute form of uncertainty.”2 Also saying that people might become aware that they have limitations on their abilities and the losses they may face in making those decisions. This makes this type of stress a powerful one; it also reduces the quality of decisions a person makes.
Recently there has been a lot of interest in occupational stress management with a lot of consultants being hired to deliver stress management programmes. When faced with stress and left people can come up with their own way of dealing with it, some more effective than others. Research shows that the way people deal with stress tend to fall into three main types:
- Appraisal focused: This is where a person will analyse what has changed in their life recently and try and find out what the trouble is. People in this category also look at the situation optimistically trying to find a good point in there somewhere. Sometimes people try and deal with it by denying the problem exists.
- Problem focused: This is where the person tries to find what is causing the stress by talking it over with their family and then tackling the problem itself. This might involve a person introducing different targets as the ones that are currently there might be too difficult to get and therefore by have more achievable targets would be solving the problem.
- Emotion focused: This is mainly used when there is nothing or very little that can solve the problem. They have a varied range of things they do, they try and not pay attention to the problem. They try and smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol or eat a lot of food etc to ease the stress. They try and look at the situation and instead of looking at any potential good points; they will look at what the worst that can happen is. They will also try and deal with it by maybe being violent and damaging property, and loosing their temper etc. This isn’t a very good way of dealing with stress and may even increase the problem the person is facing.
Research shows that the first two strategies are more effective in dealing with stress and people using those ways experience less physical and psychological damage, as the alcohol and cigarettes do cause considerable amounts of damage to the human body especially when consumed at large amounts.
Stress is the outcome of uncertainty high demands and low control. It isn’t limited to one or two groups of occupations it arises in a lot of occupations where there is a high demand and not enough control. But there are situations in which stress is more likely to affect people such as in cases of uncertainty. People do develop their own ways of dealing with stress and some are better then others but more and more organisations are hiring consultants to deal with stress management to make people deal with it better.
References
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Fincham, R, Rhodes, P, (2001) Principals of Organisational Behaviour, 3rd Ed
Other sources:
- Beehr, T.A., (1995) Psychological Stress in the Workplace, London Routledge
- Fisher, C.D. and Gitelson, R, (1983), Journal of Applied Psychology, 68, 320-33
- Glass, D.C. (1977), Behaviour Patterns, Stress and Coronary Heart Disease. Hillsdale, NJ Lawrence Erlbraum.
- Selye, H, (1975), Stress, in Employee Physical fitness in Canada, Ottawa National Health and Welfare, Information Canada.