Stress Defined
The term stress had none of its contemporary connotations before the 1950s. It is a form of the Middle English, “destresse”, derived via Old french from the latin “stringere”, meaning to draw tight.
Stress is the general term applied to the pressures people feel in life. The presence of stress at work is almost inevitable in many jobs. However, individual differences account for a wide range of reactions to stress. It may produce an intense rush of energy to one, or it may give a great deal of anxiety to another.
Another view on stress is that it is a feeling that is created when the body reacts to particular events. It is the body's way of rising to a challenge and preparing to meet a tough situation with focus, strength, stamina, and heightened alertness.
Stress also leads to the emergence of physical disorders, because the body tries to cope with stress. Some of these disorders are short-range such as an upset stomach, the other is long-range such as diseases of the heart, kidneys, and many others.
Extreme Products of Stress
Stress can either be temporary or long-term, either mild or severe. The effects on an employee depends upon how long its causes continue, how powerful they are, and how strong the employee’s recovery powers are. Listed below are the products of stress as enumerated by Newstrom and Davis:
Burnout Defined
It is a situation in which employees are emotionally exhausted, become detached from their clients and their work, and feel unable to accomplish their goals. Burnout is also a gradual process by which a person, in response to prolonged stress and physical, mental and emotional strain, detaches from work and other meaningful relationships. The result is lowered productivity, cynicism, confusion, a feeling of being drained, having nothing more to give.
Trauma Defined
It is a condition that occurs following a major threat to one’s security. It is also an emotional wound or shock often having long-lasting effects.
Three Types of Trauma
1. Workplace Trauma
It is the disintegration of employee’s self-concepts and beliefs in their capabilities. It can arise from harassment from work, wrongful termination. Discrimination or an employee’s perceived incapacity to meet evolving performance expectations.
Symptoms of Workplace trauma:
a. Severe moodiness
b. Concentration Difficulties
c. Alienation
d. Tardiness
e. Absenteeism
f. Accident-proneness
2. Layoff Survivor’s Sickness
The condition experienced by individuals remaining employed after mass downsizing.
3. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder
It is a condition that pertains to any person who witness violence, receives injury from it, or lives under the fear of repeated future violence. The effects of these crises may last for years and may require lengthy treatment
Causes of Stress
Conditions that tend to cause stress are called stressors. It also pertains to any emotional or physical demand that gives or results in stress.
Job-related causes of Stress
1. Work Overload and time deadlines
These events put employees into pressure and lead into stress. These pressures arise from management, and poor management oftentimes result to stress. Some stress-producing factors resulting from management are an autocratic supervisor, insecure job climate, and inadequate authority to match one’s responsibility.
2. Role Conflict and Ambiguity
Conflict arises when people have different expectations of an employee’s activities on a job. Therefore, the employee does not know what to do and cannot meet all expectations. The Job Description is not also defined well, so the employee fails to depend on an official model.
3. Differences between company values and employee values
Substantial differences can lead to significant mental stress as an effort is made to balance the requirements of both sets of values. Such cases are evident between achievement-centered individuals and organization-centered individuals.
4. Nature of Work
Some jobs produce more stress than others. Those which involve rotating shift work, machine-paced tasks, routine and repetitive work, or hazardous environments associated with greater stress. Examples of which include doctors, nurses, police, emergency response teams, call center professionals, IT practicioners, and those who work for manufacturing firms.
Frustration
It is a result of a motivation being blocked to prevent one from reaching a desired goal. The greater the obstruction, and the greater the will, the more the frustration is. Causes of frustration may be internal or external. In people, internal frustration may arise from challenges in fulfilling personal goals and desires, instinctual drives and needs, or dealing with perceived deficiencies, such as a lack of confidence or fear of social situations. Conflict can also be an internal source of frustration; when one has competing goals that interfere with one another, it can create cognitive dissonance. External causes of frustration involve conditions outside an individual, such as a blocked road or a difficult task.
Reactions to Frustration
1. Aggression - People became aggressive, reflecting on frustrations that are upsetting them.
2. Apathetic – People does not respond to their job or to their associates
3. Withdrawal – People ask for transfer or termination from their job.
4. Regression – Involves self-pity and pouting.
5. Fixation – People blame their supervisor for both their problems and the problems of others, regardless of the facts.
6. Physical Disorders – People experience physiological ailments such as an upset stomach
7. Choosing Substitute Goal – People divert from original plan, resulting to a lesser, but more achievable goal.
Sources of Frustration
1. Management – Primary source of frustration.
2. Co-workers – Includes individuals that place barriers in the way of goal attainment.
3. The work itself – Includes machineries or equipment used or the nature of the work itself.
4. Environment – Includes weather and certain work conditions.
5. Yourself
Stress-Performance Model
This illustrates the relationship between stress level and job performance. It is significantly shown that if there are no stress, job challenges are minimal which results to under-stimulated employees and lower performance. As stress increases, performance upgrades, and challenges are met. At this point, it results to optimal performance for employees. However, if the stress level is too high, performance degrades, employee feels overwhelmed, distressed, and dysfunctional. If it continued, the performance becomes zero and the employee has to breakdown, experience ailments or refuse to face work.
Stress Vulnerability
Stress threshold
It pertains to the level of stressors that a person can tolerate before negative feelings of stress occur and adversely affect performance.
Low Threshold. Small changes or disruptions in the work routines of employees cause a reduction in performance already.
Higher Threshold. Employees stay cool, calm, and productive longer under the same conditions.
Perceived Control
The amount of control the employees have over their work and working conditions. A higher perceived control results to handling work pressures even better.
Type A vs. Type B People
Type A. These kinds of people are aggressive, competitive, set high standards, are impatient with themselves and others, and thrive under constant time pressures. They make excessive demands of themselves even in recreation or leisure. However, these people are prone to physical ailments related to stress such as heart attacks.
Type B. These kinds of people are more calmed, easygoing, accept situations and work within them rather than fight them competitively, relaxed under time pressures and less prone to problems associated to stress.
Approaches to Stress Management
There are three broad options in managing stress, first is to prevent or control it, next is to escape from it, or lastly to adapt to it. The following are ways to reduce or eliminate stressors for employees:
1. Social Support – It is a network of helpful activities, interactions, and relationships that provides an employee with the satisfaction of important needs.
Four types of support:
a. Instrumental – involving task assistance
b. Informational – providing helpful information
c. Evaluative – providing feedbacks and evaluation
d. Emotional – carrying out emotional support
2. Relaxation – Involves quiet, concentrated inner thought in order to rest the body physically and emotionally. It helps remove stress and its symptoms
3. Biofeedback – People under medical guidance learn from instrument feedback to influence symptoms of stress. It also refers to exercising some control over these internal processes. It helps reduce undesirable effects of stress.
4. Sabbaticals – Temporarily removing one from stressors. Includes sabbatical leaves which encourages stress relief and personal education. It adds to organizational flexibility and raise employee competency and self-esteem.
5. Personal Wellness – This includes the trend for in-house programs for preventive maintenance for personal wellness that are based on research in behavioural medicine. These wellness centers include disease screening, health education and fitness centers. It is preferable to reduce causes of stress while enabling employees to use more of their full potential.
EMPLOYEE COUNSELLING
Counselling Defined
It is a discussion with an employee of a problem that usually has emotional content in order to help the employee cope with it better. Counselling also seeks to improve mental health. With an improved mental health, employees feel comfortable more about themselves, right about other people, and able to meet the demands at work.
Counselling is also a scientific process which is largely accepted by many of us. Whether its vocation guidance or coping with personal trauma, counselling surely makes it easy for people to seek professional guidance.
Need for Counselling
Counselling arises from a variety of employee problems including stress.
Employee Side. Employees benefit from the understanding and guidance that counselling can provide.
Employer Side. Employers benefit from employees performing well under such condition with regards to coping with stressful situations and events.
Functions of Counselling
The objective of counselling is to help employees develop better mental health so that they will grow in self-confidence, understanding, self-control, and ability to work effectively. In order to achieve that objective, six activities must be performed by counselling:
Advice. It requires the counsellor to make judgments about the counselee’s problems and to lay out a course of action. However, in this setup, counselee feels inferior and dependent upon the counsellor. In the work setting, employees expect it and managers tend to provide it.
Reassurance. It is a way of giving the employees courage to face a problem or a feeling of confidence that they are pursuing a suitable course of action. However, counselees do not merely accept it right away. This reassurance may fade away as soon as they face the problems again. It may also lead to making poor personal decisions. In the work setting, it is useful in some situations but must be handled carefully.
Communication. Communication can be classified into two, one is upward, the other downward. In the former, it is a key way for employees to express their feelings to management. In the latter, it helps interpret company activities to employees as they discuss problems related to the. The counsellor’s job is to discover emotional problems related to company policies (upward communication) and to interpret those types of problems to top management. From the top management, the counsellor’s job is to elaborate effectively to the employee (downward communication) the responses of the management.
Release of Emotional Tension. This release of emotional tension from frustrations and other problems occur whenever the employees have an opportunity to tell someone about them. Tensions are known to subside after people begin to explain their problems to a sympathetic listener. However, this does not solve any of the employee’s problem but it does remove mental blocks enabling the employees to face the problem again and think constructively about it.
Clarified Thinking. It is a normal result of emotional release but only a skilled counsellor can aid this process. In this setting, the counsellor serves as an aid only and refrains from telling the counselee what is right. The result of this function is that a person is encouraged to accept responsibility for emotional problems and to be more realistic in solving them.
Reorientation. It involves a change in the employee’s psychic self through a change In basic goals and values. The need for reorientation must be recognized before the employee’s need for it becomes severe, so that the employees can be referred to a professional help in time for a successful treatment
Role of Managers
The abovementioned functions except for reorientation can be performed by managers. If ever there is a professional counselling service available, it will be referred to the employees for consultation.
Managers are important counsellors. They are the persons who are interacting daily to their employees. While employees value emotions, they expect that their managers will value it as well. Therefore, managers need training to help them understand problems of employees and counsel them effectively.
TYPES OF COUNSELLING
1. Directive Counselling
It is referred to as counsellor-centered counselling. It is also a process of listening to an employee’s problem, deciding with the employee what should be done, and then telling and motivating the employee to do it. This type of counselling accomplishes the advice function, though the advice may not be helpful at all times. It also fulfils the other functions namely reassurance, communication, emotional release and clarified thinking.
2. Non-Directive Counselling
It is referred to as client-centered counselling. It is developed by two groups, Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, and others at Western Electric Company and Carl R. Rogers and his colleagues.
The basic idea is to get the employee to discuss feelings, to explore solutions, and to make wise decisions. It fulfils the communication, emotional release, clarified thinking functions of counselling. Finally, it emphasized changing the person instead of dealing only with the immediate problem.
Iceberg Model
Nondirective counsellors follow this model in which they recognize that sometimes more feelings are hidden under the surface of a counselee’s communication that are revealed.
Therefore, the counsellors constantly encourage the counselee to open up and reveal deeper feelings that may help solve the employee’s problem.
3. Participative Counselling
It is referred to as cooperative counselling. It is also a mutual counsellor-counselee relationship that establishes a cooperative exchange of ideas to help solve a counselee’s problems. The counsellor and the counselee mutually apply their different knowledge, perspectives, and values to problems. It is therefore a composite between the advantages of the two counselling methods listed above while avoiding most of their disadvantages.
Participative counselling involves two processes:
1. Counsellors employ listening techniques of nondirective counselling;
2. Counselors then offer bits of knowledge and insight regarding the situation giving the counselee a different view of the problem.
In the work setting, it fulfils the counseling functions of reassurance, communication, emotional release, and clarified thinking.
Contingency View
The manager’s decision to use either directive, participative, or non-directive counselling with an employee should be based on an analysis of several contingency factors:
a. The degree to which the employee’s problem appears to be focusing on facts and the need for a logical and timely solution.
b. The degree to which the employee’s problem appears to be focusing on personal feelings and emotions.
c. The degree to which the manager is willing to devote time and effort to the growth and development of a more independent employee.
d. Counselees have different expectations for the behaviors and characteristics of their counsellors.
The manager therefore should be aware of the alternatives available, the skills required for each alternative and the analytical ability to make a choice that fits a situation.
Stress affects both the physical and mental health of an employee and if it exceeded the resilience of an individual, it may result to burnout, trauma, and other extreme or fatal conditions. For this reason, several counseling programs are needed in order to help employees deal with both job and personal problems, which depends upon the source of underlying stress.
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References:
Newstrom, John W. and Keith Davis. Organization Behavior Human Behavior at Work Tenth Edition, Beethoven Publishing, 1997.
