Organizational Stress
What is organizational stress?
Stress is the result of a kind of interaction between the organizational environment and the individual. The impact can be both positive and negative. Positive organizational stress motivates organizational functioning while negative stress debilitates it. Organizations need to monitor and assess the stress level in their situations regularly so that it does not lead to negative situations/ There are many tools available for this. Accordingly, organizations need to know how to tackle stress when such situations occur.
Impact of Stress
Healthy organizational stress has a positive influence. When the atmosphere is charged and full of enthusiasm, energy and drive, employees would feel motivated to do their jobs. Positive stress or eu-stress is necessary to keep employees motivated, alert and interested in their jobs. If there is no positive stress, employees would be unmotivated and unproductive. Hence, organizations and especially leadership have to shoulder the responsibility to ensure that there is enough pressure to keep employees energised and focussed as well as disciplined.
Increased competitiveness and uncertain global environment as well as management changes can cause negative effects on organizational morale and functioning. (Stavrola, Griffiths & Cox, 2014) The Increased stress can lead to big staff turnover, high sickness absence, voluntary retirement, earlier organizational stress used to be thought of as entirely the employee’s responsibility but now it is understood that employers have a great role to play in contributing to this. (Michie, 2002). (Manning & Preston, 2014)
Tools you would use to assess stress
It is important to identify underlying cause of stress in an organization. Objective measures provide less relevant information whereas subjective measures would provide more specific information. Examples of some objective organizational measures of stress used to evaluate organizational effectiveness include those which are used to measure organizational growth such as abseenteism rate, tardiness rate, rate and severity of work related accidents, employee transfer rate, employee turnover rate Etc. While these give figures, are quantifiable and can give an idea about the proportion of stress in different groups, and give an exact idea of the extent of prevailing, they do not exactly highlight the underlying cause.
Measures which can give more inputs as into the reasons behind the stress include Quality of Life Worklife Questionnaire which is used to assess job related stress and satisfaction. These gauges the opinion of participants on job hours, work, culture and climate and effects on health etc. Another tool is the ASSET (An Organizational stress screening tool), Occupational Stress Inventory –Revised Edition (OSI-R) which measures different levels of occupational stress and strain. The Job Stress Survey measures the severity of working conditions (Preventive Stress Management, 2014)
Promote or minimise the stress in an organization
The kind of situation highlighted in scenario 1 is what often is observed in my observation. There was extreme amount of stress owing to bad management practices such as lack of transparency and communication, no clear cut channels for feedback , top down approach and inconcistency in procedures and job assignments. What I would do to ensure that these processes are laid down clearly to avoid miscommunication, conflicts and stress while at the same time, ensuring that positive motivation is also poured in. Frequent communication and feedback sessions to convey both improvements as well as appreciation of good work done as well as taking in inputs and suggestions. The way of managing stress is to minimise negativity while also ensuring that enough positive stress is there to keep employees active and interested. I will re-evaluate the tasks and ensure that matching is done according to the abilities of the employees. I will also ensure that the whole team is made aware of change management procedures and routines. (Michie, 2000)
Conclusion
In summary, managing organizational stress is of great importance to an organization. Both positive stress and negative stress has to be managed for optimum benefits.
References
Manning, D., & Preston, A. (2014). Organizational Stress. www.cupahr.org. Retrieved 2 June 2014, from http://www.cupahr.org/knowledgecenter/hehr_db/articles/employee_rel/Organizational%20Stress.pdf
Michie, S. (2002). Causes and management of stress at work. Occupational And Environmental Medicine, 59(1), 67--72.
Stavrola, l., Griffiths, A., & Cox, T. (2014). Work Organization and Stress. www.who.int. Retrieved 2 June 2014, from http://www.who.int/occupational_health/publications/en/oehstress.pdf
supp.apa.org,. (2014). Preventive Stress Management. Retrieved 2 June 2014, from http://supp.apa.org/books/Preventive-Stress-Management-Second/organizationalstressors.pdf
