Workplace Stress

overworked man
Workaholics tend to live in extremes, with great job satisfaction and creativity on the one hand and high levels of frustration and exhaustion on the other hand. Now, a new Florida State University study offers managers practical ways to help these employees stay healthy and effective on the job.

Wayne Hochwarter, the Jim Moran Professor of Business Administration in Florida State’s College of Business, and research associate Daniel Herrera studied more than 400 employees in professional and administrative occupations and found about 60 percent of these workers identified themselves as workaholics who characteristically “feel guilty when taking time off.”
These self-identified workaholics reported positive and negative career consequences. For example, workaholics reported they gave more effort compared to other workers, but they also experienced more tension. They were more willing to help others, yet were more likely to view co-workers as feeling entitled.

“We found that there is an optimal level of workaholism for job effectiveness and positive health,” Hochwarter said. “However, when in excessively low or high ranges, both the company and the employee are likely to suffer.”
Identified workaholics were divided into those who had access to resources, such as personnel, rest, equipment and social support at work, and those who did not.
“We discovered that workaholics really struggle when they feel that they are alone or swimming upstream without a paddle,” Hochwarter said.

Workaholics who said they had access to resources reported a:

40 percent higher rate of job satisfaction
• 33 percent lower rate of burnout
• 30 percent higher rate of perceived job importance
• 30 percent lower rate of exclusion from others
• 25 percent higher rate of career fulfillment
• 20 percent lower rate of work frustration.

“Given the volatility in today’s work environment, the ability to work hard, contribute long hours and demonstrate value is at a premium,” Herrera said. “Thus, workaholism will likely remain alive and well for years to come.”
But there are ways to guide the efforts of workaholics in positive directions, researchers said.

First, leaders should meet with workaholics to determine what physical and social resources they need and then help increase their accessibility to those resources in fair and reasonable ways, according to the researchers. Managers often assume that workaholics simply want others to get out of their way. In reality, the goal of most workaholics is to contribute to the company, achieve personal success and see how their efforts affect the bottom line — objectives that are much more likely achieved with resources.

Second, managers need to have more realistic expectations, they said. Workaholics are often the company’s most productive employees — serving as the manager’s “go-to” worker when an important project surfaces or a deadline looms. Because of their value, managers have a tendency to run workaholics into the ground, promising a future chance to recharge that often never happens.
“Having realistic expectations that take into account both the work and the person doing the work, is essential,” Hochwarter said. The warning signs of burnout are recognizable and, if ignored, they will eventually lead to unwanted outcomes ranging from declining performance to death.

Florida State University

Image: Getty Images

Stressed worker

 
Canadians are under pressure on the job – especially those with higher status, challenging work or in positions of authority.
 
And having more control in the workplace can have negative consequences for individuals but it depends on the form of job control, say researchers from the University of Toronto.

Sociologist Scott Schieman measured a range of work conditions using data from a national survey of 6,004 Canadian workers. To measure levels of job pressure, he asked study participants questions such as: “How often do you feel overwhelmed by how much you had to do at work?” “How often do you have to work on too many tasks at the same time?” and “How often do the demands of your job exceed the time you have to do the work?”

He found that roughly one-third of Canadian workers report that they “often” or “very often” feel overwhelmed by work or that the demands of their job exceed the time to do the work. Four out of 10 workers report having to work on too many tasks at the same time “often” or “very often.”

“Excessive job demands have detrimental effects,” says Schieman. “We know that workers who report higher scores on these indicators of job pressure also tend to experience more problems navigating work and family roles, more symptoms of physical and mental health problems and they tend to be less satisfied with their work.”

The study found that having control over one’s work schedule and job autonomy are associated with lower levels of job pressure. However, challenging work in which one is required to keep learning new things, engage in creative activities, use skills and abilities and handle a variety of tasks, is associated with higher levels of job pressure as is being in a position of authority where one is supervising or managing others.

Three key indicators of higher socioeconomic status (SES) – education, higher status occupations (executives or professionals) and income – were each independently associated with greater job pressure. “However, those with high SES face greater pressure mostly because of their more challenging work and greater levels of authority,” says Schieman.

“These findings speak directly to the idea of the stress of higher status,” said Schieman. “People talk these days about being ‘crazy busy’ and not having enough time to do all the things at work that need to get done. But being ‘crazy busy’ isn’t randomly distributed in the population. This study demonstrates an unexpected price for higher SES and more control at work –and that price is excessive pressure in the workplace.”

Job-Related Resources and the Pressures of Working Life, is published in the journal Social Science Research.

University of Toronto

A co-worker’s rudeness can have a great impact on relationships far beyond the workplace, according to a Baylor University study published online in the Journal of Organizational Behavior. Findings suggest that stress created by incivility can be so intense that, at the end of the day, it is taken home by the worker and impacts the well-being of the worker’s family and partner, who in turn takes the stress to his/her workplace.

“Employees who experience such incivility at work bring home the stress, negative emotion and perceived ostracism that results from those experiences, which then affects more than their family life – it also creates problems for the partner’s life at work,” said Merideth J. Ferguson, Ph.D., assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Baylor University Hankamer School of Business and study author.

“This research underlines the importance of stopping incivility before it starts so that the ripple effect of incivility does not impact the employee’s family and potentially inflict further damage beyond the workplace where the incivility took place and cross over into the workplace of the partner,” she said. [continue reading…]

How to find fulfillment at work

When you start being true to yourself your work takes on a whole new meaning.

Watch Simon Sinek discuss how to find fulfilment at work. There’s a statistic that over 90% of people go home at the end of the day feeling unfulfilled by their work. This is the difference between liking your job and loving your job. You can like your job, but do you love your job? Over 90% of the people who work these days don’t. Simon talks about his strategy to reverse this.

Source:
Big Think