Week 6: Occupational Stress

Question 1

What is Stress?

Answer 1

• A state of tension experienced by individuals facing extraordinary demands, constraints, or opportunities
• An adaptive response to a situation perceived as challenging or threatening to wellbeing
• Physiological and psychological responses
• Eustress vs. distress

Question 2

Stressor:

Strain:

Stress:

Answer 2

Stressor: causes or antecedents of stress

Strain: consequences of stress (an individual’s physical and/or psychological responses)

Stress: the overall process involving stressors, strain and coping

Question 3

Why Address Occupational Stress?

Answer 3

• Financial costs:
  
  • $60 billion per year for the Australian economy (in absenteeism, turnover, healthcare)
• Health and performance costs:
  
  • sickness, fatigue, chronic pain
  • decreased performance, absenteeism, workplace injuries
  • US statistics reveal that the duration of work incapacity attributable to occupational stress is four times longer than incapacity attributable to other workplace injuries.
• Social costs:
  
  • anti-social behaviour: (e.g., road rage, bullying, harassment)
  • work pressure
• In Australia in the 2004-05 period the most common categories of formal occupational stress claims were:
  
  • work pressure (41% of all stress claims)
  • harassment (22%)
  • exposure to violence (16%)
  • exposure to a traumatic event (5%).

Question 4

Response-based Stress Theory: Selye’s General Adaptation Syndrome (consequences of stress)

Answer 4

• Alarm
• Adaptation
• Exhaustion

Question 5

Stimulus-based Stress Theories (causes of stress)

Answer 5

• Stress results from the perceived demand posed by a life circumstance
• When we are stressed, we talk about being under strain or feeling weighed down
• Assessing the stress stimuli enables the overall degree of stress to be determined
• This means that not all individuals exposed to a given stimulus will exhibit the same stress response

Question 6

Transactional Stress Theory (causes and consequences of stress process)

Answer 6

• Lazarus & Folkman (1984)
  
  • Percieved Stressor
  • Appraisal
    
    • Primary
    • Secondary
    • Re-appraisal
  • Coping response

Question 7

Occupational Stress Theories: Person-Environment Fit

Answer 7

• French, Caplan, & Harrison, 1982
  
  • Strain occurs due to an imbalance between a person’s abilities and the demands of the environment
  • Each person has an optimal level of environmental demands where minimal strain occurs
  • Too little or too much demand results in strain

Question 8

Occupational Stress Theories: ‘Work Stress’ Model

Answer 8

• Cooper and Marshall (1976)
  
  • Describes the core elements of the occupational stress process:
    
    • a) sources of stress;
    • b) individual characteristics that influence the stress process; and
    • c) the consequences of prolonged stress
• Sources of occupational stress
• Individual characteristics (individual and work-family balance)
• Ill-health symptoms (individual and organisartional symptoms)
• Stress consequences (individual and organisation)

Question 9

Occupational Stress Theories: Warr’s ‘Vitamin’ Model (10)

Answer 9

Identifies the 10 key characteristics of jobs that impact on strain and wellbeing:

1. Opportunity for personal control: Employees who perceive that they have little autonomy over their workload, work hours and work teams, or minimal participation in decision- making, tend to experience more occupational stress.
2. Opportunity for skill use: Individuals who perceive their skills are not valued or not fully utilised are more likely to experience stress and ill-health.
3. Externally generated goals: Excessive amounts of external goals and targets imposed on workers, such as job demands, workload, responsibilities and role conflict, and work-family balance, are associated with psychological strain and poor job performance.
4. Variety: Some variety in such things as job content, location and use of skills can be beneficial. Too little variety (boredom and repetition) or too much variety (confusion) leads to poor health and performance outcomes.
5. Environment clarity: Ensuring that workers have adequate (and constructive) information about the consequences of their work behaviour (performance, quality levels etc.) and of required future behaviour is associated with low levels of strain.
6. Availability of money: An income that is deemed by the individual to be inadequate and/ or unequal to comparative colleagues’ incomes is generally associated with impaired levels of health and wellbeing.
7. Physical security: Core health and safety issues. Ensuring individuals work in physically safe environments, including appropriate levels of noise and temperature, and with adequate, suitably designed and correctly working equipment, obviously reduces physical stressors.
8. Supportive supervision: This was added to Warr’s revised list in 2005. As is described in the following model, adequate support at work, especially from supervisors and managers, is strongly associated with positive health and performance outcomes.
9. Opportunity for interpersonal contact: Both the quantity of interpersonal contact (some contact but also enough privacy) and the quality of interpersonal contact (positive relationships, good communication and absence of harassment and bullying) are associated with positive health and job performance outcomes.
10. Valued social position: The perception of the job/role both within the organisation (perceived meaningfulness of role and task significance) and externally (job’s social status and prestige) can influence levels of occupational stress.

The model emphasises the curvilinear nature between stressors and strain, rather than a linear relationship

Question 10

Occupational Stress Theories: Job Demands-Control Model

Answer 10

• Karasek, 1979
  
  • Perceived levels of job demands and job control are associated with occupational stress
  • Jobs with high demands and low control produce the most stressful outcomes: high-strain jobs
  • Jobs with low demands and low control result in boredom: passive jobs

Question 11

Organisational Consequences of Occupational Stress

Answer 11

• Job Performance:
  
  • Moderate levels of stress with the appropriate resources can help increase performance (eustress: high demands for a defined short time, such as meeting a deadline)
  • High stress levels with low resources tends to result in decreased performance
• Absenteeism:
  
  • Absence from work attributable to occupational stress is on the rise, particularly in high-risk occupations
  • Underestimated relationship between occupational stress and absenteeism: few people admit stress as cause for absence
• Job Attitudes:
  
  • Stress often results in changes to job attitudes (e.g., low motivation and job satisfaction, negative attitudes towards colleagues and clients, turnover intentions)
  • Chronic occupational stress can → decreased levels of job satisfaction, which in turn can → strain, decreased job performance and increased turnover intentions

Question 12

Burnout

Job Burnout Process

Answer 12

Burnout: Burnout is defined as ‘a syndrome of emotional exhaustion, depersonalisation, and reduced personal accomplishment that can occur among individuals who work with people in some capacity’

Job Burnout Process: see pic

Maslach et al. (2001) demonstrated that males tend to score more highly on measures of cynicism and lower on emotional exhaustion than females. Maslach and colleagues also found that burnout is related to hardiness (stress resistance), perceptions of control and neuroticism (negative attitudes), such that individuals high in neuroticism are also prone to burnout.

Question 13

Jobs considered to be the most stressful:

Answer 13

• teachers
• nurses
• police officers
• prison officers
• military
• doctors (including GPs) hotel managers
• public administration (e.g. hospital managers)
• scientific researchers
• clericals, sales and service
• drivers of public transport (e.g. train and bus drivers)
• social welfare workers
• ambulance officers and paramedics
• fire fighters
• bank workers

Question 14

What Causes Stress at Work?

Answer 14

• Traumatic events
  
  • Rare but critical incidents, often involving violence and/or death (affects emergency responders, military, etc.)
• Hassles
  
  • Frequent and frustrating minor incidents
  • Daily hassles are just as important for the prediction of job satisfaction, turnover and psychological strain as traumatic incidents
• Psychological harassment
  
  • Repeated and hostile or unwanted conduct, verbal comments, actions, or gestures that affect an employee’s dignity or psychological or physical integrity, and that can result in a harmful work environment for the employee
  • ~70% of Australian employees are being bullied or had experienced bullying in the past
• Sexual Harassment
  
  • Unwelcome conduct – detrimental effect on work environment or job performance
  • Gender harassment, unwanted sexual attention, sexual coercion (Fitzgerald et al., 1995)
  • Quid pro quo
    
    • Employment or job performance conditional on unwanted sexual relations
• Hostile work environment
  
  • Intimidating, hostile, or offensive working environment
  • Work overload
  • Working more hours more intensely than one can cope with
  • Affected by globalisation, consumerism, ideal worker norm
• Task control stressor
  
  • Due to lack of control over how and when tasks are performed
  • Stress increases with responsibility

Question 15

Coping

Coping strategies

Answer 15

• Coping
  
  • A response to a specific stressor consisting of a behaviour (e.g., exercising) or a cognition (e.g., appraising the impact of the stressor)
  • Reflects how individuals respond to or deal with stressful events
• Lazarus and Folkman (1984) (coping strategies)
  
  • Problem-focused coping
    
    • Pragmatic; involves searching for solutions (e.g., attempting to deal with the stress experience by seeing a counsellor)
  • Emotion-focused coping
    
    • View situation as hopeless; focus on moderating behaviour/response (e.g., avoiding the stressor through substance use)

Question 16

Stress Management Interventions (SMIs)

Answer 16

• Formal programs adopted by an organisation to address occupational stress and develop a healthy work environment
• Three tiers:
  
  • Stressor reduction (the most effective method of stress reduction but used least because it often requires a lot of resources)
  • Stress management training
  • Employee assistance programs (EAPs) (usually focus on counselling, debriefing and/or guidance for those experiencing stress)

Question 17

How Effective are SMIs?

Answer 17

• Little research: organisational programs and participating employees are difficult to access and evaluate
• Criticism of stress management training and Employee Assistant Programss: more emphasis on rehabilitating the worker than eliminating occupational stressors
• A combination of SMIs should result in reduced occupational stress

Question 18

Other Stress Management Strategies

Answer 18

• Change stress perceptions
  
  • Self-confidence, self-leadership practices
• Control stress consequences
  
  • Relaxation and meditation
  • Fitness and wellness programs
• Social support
  
  • Emotional and informational