7.1 Avoiding and Managing Stress
Learning Objectives
- Discuss what individuals can do to manage their own stress.
- Discuss what organizations can do to help their employees avoid and manage stress.
Approaches to Managing Stress: The Corporate Athlete
Luckily, there are several ways to manage stress. One way is to harness stress’s ability to improve our performance. The “corporate athlete” approach to stress is a proactive (action-first) rather than a reactive (response-driven) approach. While an overdose of stress can cause some individuals to stop exercising, eat less nutritious foods, and develop a sense of hopelessness, corporate athletes ward off the potentially overwhelming feelings of stress by developing strong bodies and minds that embrace challenges, as opposed to being overwhelmed by them.
Flow
Turning stress into fuel for corporate athleticism is one way of transforming a potential enemy into a workplace ally. Another way to transform stress is by breaking challenges into smaller parts and embracing the ones that give us joy. In doing so, we can enter a state much like that of a child at play, fully focused on the task at hand, losing track of everything except our genuine connection to the challenge before us. This concept of total engagement in one’s work, or in other activities, is called flow. The term flow was coined by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1997) and is defined as a state of consciousness in which a person is totally absorbed in an activity. We’ve all experienced flow: It’s the state of mind in which you feel strong, alert, and in effortless control.
According to this way of thinking, the most pleasurable way for a person to work is in harmony with his or her true interests. Work is seen as more similar to playing games than most activities adults do. This is because work consists of tasks, puzzles, surprises, and potentially rewarding challenges. By breaking down a busy workday into smaller pieces, individuals can shift from the “stress” of work to a more engaged state of flow.
Corporate athleticism and flow are two concepts that can help you cope with stress. Next, let us focus more on exactly how individual lifestyle choices affect our stress levels. Eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep, and employing time management techniques are all things we can affect that can decrease our feelings of stress.
Sleep
It is a vicious cycle. Stress can make it hard to sleep. Not sleeping makes it harder to focus on work in general, as well as on specific tasks. Tired folks are more likely to lose their temper, upping the stress level of others. The work–life crunch experienced by many makes a good night’s sleep seem out of reach. A person who misses work due to exhaustion will return to work to find an even more stressful workload. This cycle can easily increase the stress level of a work team as well as that of an overtired individual.
Create a Social Support Network
A consistent finding is that those individuals who have a strong social support network are less stressed than those who do not (Halbesleben, 2006). Individuals can help build up social support by encouraging a team atmosphere in which coworkers support one another. Just being able to talk with and listen to others, either with coworkers at work or with friends and family at home, can help decrease stress levels.
Time Management
Time management is defined as the development of tools or techniques that help us be more productive when we work. Effective time management is a major factor in reducing stress because it decreases much of the pressure we feel. With information and role overload, it is easy to fall into bad habits of simply reacting to unexpected situations. Time management techniques include prioritizing, managing organization, and keeping a schedule, such as a paper or electronic organizing tool. Just like any new skill, developing time management takes conscious effort, but the gains might be worthwhile if your stress level is reduced.
Organizational Approaches to Managing Stress
Stress-related issues cost businesses billions of dollars per year in absenteeism, accidents, and lost productivity (Hobson et al., 2004). As a result, managing employee stress is an important concern for organizations as well as individuals. Organizations can take many steps to help employees with stress, including having clearer expectations for them, creating jobs where employees have autonomy and control, and creating a fair work environment. Finally, larger organizations normally utilize outside resources to help employees get professional help when needed.
Make Expectations Clear
One way to reduce stress is to state your expectations clearly. Workers who have clear descriptions of their jobs experience less stress than those whose jobs are ill-defined (Jackson & Schuler, 1985; Sauter, Murphy, & Hurrell, 1990). The same thing goes for individual tasks. Can you imagine the benefits of working in a place where every assignment was clear and employees were content and focused on their work? It would be a great place to work as a manager, too. Stress can be contagious, but as we’ve seen above, this kind of happiness can be contagious, too. Creating clear expectations doesn’t have to be a top–down event. Managers may be unaware that their directives are increasing their subordinates’ stress by upping their confusion. In this case, a gentle conversation that steers a project in a clearer direction can be a simple but powerful way to reduce stress. In the interest of reducing stress on all sides, it’s important to frame situations as opportunities for solutions as opposed to sources of anger.
Give Employees Autonomy
Giving employees a sense of autonomy is another thing that organizations can do to help relieve stress (Kossek, Lautschb, & Eaton, 2006). It has long been known that one of the most stressful things that individuals deal with is a lack of control over their environment. Research shows that individuals who feel a greater sense of control at work deal with stress more effectively (Schaubroeck, Lam, & Xie, 2000). Employees’ stress levels are likely to be related to the degree to which organizations can build autonomy and support into jobs.
Create Fair Work Environments
Work environments that are unfair and unpredictable have been labelled “toxic workplaces.” A toxic workplace is one in which a company does not value its employees or treat them fairly (Webber, 1998). Statistically, organizations that value employees are more profitable than those that do not (Huselid, 1995; Pfeffer, 1998; Pfeffer & Veiga, 1999; Welbourne & Andrews, 1996). Research shows that working in an environment that is seen as fair helps to buffer the effects of stress (Judge & Colquitt, 2004). This reduced stress may be because employees feel a greater sense of status and self-esteem, or due to a greater sense of trust within the organization. These findings hold for outcomes individuals receive as well as the process for distributing those outcomes (Greenberg, 2004). Whatever the case, it is clear that organizations have many reasons to create work environments characterized by fairness, including lower stress levels for employees. In fact, one study showed that training supervisors to be more interpersonally sensitive even helped nurses feel less stressed about a pay cut (Greenberg, 2006).
Telecommuting
Telecommuting refers to working remotely. For example, some employees work from home, a remote satellite office, or from a coffee shop for some portion of the workweek. Being able to work away from the office is one option that can decrease stress for some employees. The keys to successful telecommuting arrangements are to match the right employees with the right jobs in the right environments. If any variable is not within a reasonable range, such as having a dog that barks all day when the employee is at home, productivity will suffer. Since the pandemic, golf clubs have been more receptive to allowing leadership positions to complete a portion of the work duties from home, where appropriate.
Employee Sabbaticals
Sabbaticals (paid time off from the normal routine at work) have long been a sacred ritual practiced by universities to help faculty stay current, work on large research projects, and recharge every 5 to 8 years. However, many companies are now in the practice of granting paid sabbaticals to their employees. Though this is not typical in the golf and club industry, due to the seasonal nature of our business, leadership positions can request short period sabbaticals. Especially for professional development purposes.
Employee Assistance Programs
There are times when life outside work causes stress in ways that will impact our lives at work and beyond. These situations may include the death of a loved one, serious illness, drug and alcohol dependencies, depression, or legal or financial problems that are impinging on our work lives. Although treating such stressors is beyond the scope of an organization or a manager, many companies offer their employees outside sources of emotional counselling. Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) are often offered to workers as an adjunct to a company-provided health care plan. Small companies in particular use outside employee assistance programs, because they don’t have the needed expertise in-house. As their name implies, EAPs offer help in dealing with crises in the workplace and beyond. EAPs are often used to help workers who have substance abuse problems.
Exercises
- Have you ever been in a state of “flow” as described in this section? If so, what was special about this time?
- Whose responsibility do you think it is to deal with employee stress—the employee or the organization? Why?
- Do you think most organizations are fair or unfair? Explain your answer.
- Have you ever considered telecommuting? What do you think would be the pros and cons for you personally?
“7.3: Avoiding and Managing Stress” from Organizational Behavior by LibreTexts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
