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Chapter 7 Managing Stress and Emotions
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
After reading this chapter, you should be able to do the following:
1. Understand the stress cycle.
2. Recognize the sources of stress for employees.
3. Recognize the outcomes of stress.
4. Understand how to manage stress in organizational contexts.
5. Understand the role emotions play for attitudes and behaviors at work.
6. Learn about emotional labor and how to manage it.
7. Understand how emotions can affect perceptions of what is ethical.
8. Understand cross-cultural differences in stressors.
Getting Emotional at American Express Death and money can be emotional topics. Sales reps at American Express
Company’s life insurance division had to deal with both these issues when
selling life insurance, and they were starting to feel the strain of working with
such volatile emotional materials every day. Part of the problem
representatives faced seemed like an unavoidable side effect of selling life
insurance. Many potential clients were responding fearfully to the sales
representatives’ calls. Others turned their fears into anger. They replied to the
representatives’ questions suspiciously or treated them as untrustworthy.
The sales force at American Express believed in the value of their work, but
over time, customers’ negative emotions began to erode employee morale.
Sales of policies slowed. Management insisted that the representatives ignore
their customers’ feelings and focus on making sales. The representatives’ more
aggressive sales tactics seemed only to increase their clients’ negative
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emotional responses, which kicked off the cycle of suffering again. It was
apparent something had to change.
In an effort to understand the barriers between customers and sales
representatives, a team led by Kate Cannon, a former American Express
staffer and mental-health administrator, used a technique called emotional
resonance to identify employees’ feelings about their work. Looking at the
problem from an emotional point of view yielded dramatic insights about
clients, sales representatives, and managers alike.
The first step she took was to acknowledge that the clients’ negative emotions
were barriers to life insurance sales. Cannon explained, “People reported all
kinds of emotional issues—fear, suspicion, powerlessness, and distrust—
involved in buying life insurance.” Clients’ negative emotions, in turn, had
sparked negative feelings among some American Express life insurance sales
representatives, including feelings of incompetence, dread, untruthfulness,
shame, and even humiliation. Management’s focus on sales had created an
emotional disconnect between the sales reps’ work and their true
personalities. Cannon discovered that sales representatives who did not
acknowledge their clients’ distress felt dishonest. The emotional gap between
their words and their true feelings only increased their distress.
Cannon also found some good news. Sales representatives who looked at their
job from the customer’s point of view were flourishing. Their feelings and their
words were in harmony. Clients trusted them. The trust between these more
openly emotional sales representatives and their clients led to greater sales
and job satisfaction. To see if emotional skills training could increase job
satisfaction and sales among other members of the team, Cannon instituted a
course in emotional awareness for a test group of American Express life
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insurance sales representatives. The goal of the course was to help employees
recognize and manage their feelings. The results of the study proved the value
of emotional clarity. Coping skills, as measured on standardized psychological
tests, improved for the representatives who took Cannon’s course.
The emotional awareness training program had significant impact on
American Express’s bottom line. Over time, as Cannon’s team expanded their
emotion-based program, American Express life insurance sales rose by tens of
millions of dollars. American Express’s exercise in emotional awareness shows
that companies can profit when feelings are recognized and consciously
managed. Employees whose work aligns with their true emotions make more
believable corporate ambassadors. The positive use of emotion can benefit a
company internally as well. According to a Gallup poll of over 2 million
employees, the majority of workers rated a caring boss higher than increased
salary or benefits. In the words of career expert and columnist Maureen
Moriarity, “Good moods are good for business.”
Sources: Schwartz, T. (2008, September 11). How do you feel? Fast
Company. Retrieved January 28, 2009,
fromhttp://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/35/emotion.html?page=0%2C2
; Kirkwood, G., & Ward, C. (2002, May 5). Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes. Paper
presented at FMA Ideation; Moriarty, M. (2007, June 7). Workplace coach:
Don’t underestimate emotional intelligence. Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Retrieved July 1, 2008, from
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/318345_workcoach04.html
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7.1 What Is Stress?
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Learn about the General Adaptation Syndrome.
2. Learn what stressors are.
3. Understand the outcomes of stress.
4. Understand individual differences in experienced stress.
Gravity. Mass. Magnetism. These words come from the physical sciences.
And so does the term stress. In its original form, the word stress relates to the
amount of force applied to a given area. A steel bar stacked with bricks is being
stressed in ways that can be measured using mathematical formulas. In
human terms, psychiatrist Peter Panzarino notes, “Stress is simply a fact of
nature—forces from the outside world affecting the individual.” [1]
The
professional, personal, and environmental pressures of modern life exert their
forces on us every day. Some of these pressures are good. Others can wear us
down over time.
Stress is defined by psychologists as the body’s reaction to a change that
requires a physical, mental, or emotional adjustment or response. [2]
Stress is
an inevitable feature of life. It is the force that gets us out of bed in the
morning, motivates us at the gym, and inspires us to work.
As you will see in the sections below, stress is a given factor in our lives. We
may not be able to avoid stress completely, but we can change how we respond
to stress, which is a major benefit. Our ability to recognize, manage, and
maximize our response to stress can turn an emotional or physical problem
into a resource.
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Researchers use polling to measure the effects of stress at work. The results
have been eye-opening. According to a 2001 Gallup poll, 80% of American
workers report that they feel workplace stress at least some of the
time. [3]
Another survey found that 65% of workers reported job stress as an
issue for them, and almost as many employees ended the day exhibiting
physical effects of stress, including neck pain, aching muscles, and insomnia.
It is clear that many individuals are stressed at work.
The Stress Process
Our basic human functions, breathing, blinking, heartbeat, digestion, and
other unconscious actions, are controlled by our lower brains. Just outside
this portion of the brain is the semiconscious limbic system, which plays a
large part in human emotions. Within this system is an area known as the
amygdala. The amygdala is responsible for, among other things, stimulating
fear responses. Unfortunately, the amygdala cannot distinguish between
meeting a 10:00 a.m. marketing deadline and escaping a burning building.
Human brains respond to outside threats to our safety with a message to our
bodies to engage in a “fight-or-flight” response. [4]
Our bodies prepare for these
scenarios with an increased heart rate, shallow breathing, and wide-eyed
focus. Even digestion and other functions are stopped in preparation for the
fight-or-flight response. While these traits allowed our ancestors to flee the
scene of their impending doom or engage in a physical battle for survival, most
crises at work are not as dramatic as this.
Hans Selye, one of the founders of the American Institute of Stress, spent his
life examining the human body’s response to stress. As an endocrinologist who
studied the effects of adrenaline and other hormones on the body, Selye
believed that unmanaged stress could create physical diseases such as ulcers
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and high blood pressure, and psychological illnesses such as depression. He
hypothesized that stress played a general role in disease by exhausting the
body’s immune system and termed this the
General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS). [5]
Figure 7.2
In Selye’s GAS model, stress affects an individual in three steps: alarm,
resistance, and exhaustion.
In the alarm phase of stress, an outside stressor jolts the individual, insisting
that something must be done. It may help to think of this as the fight-or-flight
moment in the individual’s experience. If the response is sufficient, the body
will return to its resting state after having successfully dealt with the source of
stress.
In the resistance phase, the body begins to release cortisol and draws on
reserves of fats and sugars to find a way to adjust to the demands of stress.
This reaction works well for short periods of time, but it is only a temporary
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fix. Individuals forced to endure the stress of cold and hunger may find a way
to adjust to lower temperatures and less food. While it is possible for the body
to “adapt” to such stresses, the situation cannot continue. The body is drawing
on its reserves, like a hospital using backup generators after a power failure. It
can continue to function by shutting down unnecessary items like large
overhead lights, elevators, televisions, and most computers, but it cannot
proceed in that state forever.
In the exhaustion phase, the body has depleted its stores of sugars and fats,
and the prolonged release of cortisol has caused the stressor to significantly
weaken the individual. Disease results from the body’s weakened state, leading
to death in the most extreme cases. This eventual depletion is why we’re more
likely to reach for foods rich in fat or sugar, caffeine, or other quick fixes that
give us energy when we are stressed. Selye referred to stress that led to disease
as distress and stress that was enjoyable or healing as eustress.
Workplace Stressors
Stressors are events or contexts that cause a stress reaction by elevating levels
of adrenaline and forcing a physical or mental response. The key to remember
about stressors is that they aren’t necessarily a bad thing. The saying “the
straw that broke the camel’s back” applies to stressors. Having a few stressors
in our lives may not be a problem, but because stress is cumulative, having
many stressors day after day can cause a buildup that becomes a problem. The
American Psychological Association surveys American adults about their
stresses annually. Topping the list of stressful issues are money, work, and
housing. [6]
But in essence, we could say that all three issues come back to the
workplace. How much we earn determines the kind of housing we can afford,
and when job security is questionable, home life is generally affected as well.
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Understanding what can potentially cause stress can help avoid negative
consequences. Now we will examine the major stressors in the workplace. A
major category of workplace stressors are role demands. In other words, some
jobs and some work contexts are more potentially stressful than others.
Role Demands
Role ambiguity refers to vagueness in relation to what our responsibilities are.
If you have started a new job and felt unclear about what you were expected to
do, you have experienced role ambiguity. Having high role ambiguity is related
to higher emotional exhaustion, more thoughts of leaving an organization, and
lowered job attitudes and performance. [7]
Role conflict refers to facing
contradictory demands at work. For example, your manager may want you to
increase customer satisfaction and cut costs, while you feel that satisfying
customers inevitably increases costs. In this case, you are experiencing role
conflict because satisfying one demand makes it unlikely to satisfy the
other. Role overload is defined as having insufficient time and resources to
complete a job. When an organization downsizes, the remaining employees
will have to complete the tasks that were previously performed by the laid-off
workers, which often leads to role overload. Like role ambiguity, both role
conflict and role overload have been shown to hurt performance and lower job
attitudes; however, research shows that role ambiguity is the strongest
predictor of poor performance. [8]
Research on new employees also shows that
role ambiguity is a key aspect of their adjustment, and that when role
ambiguity is high, new employees struggle to fit into the new organization. [9]
Information Overload
Messages reach us in countless ways every day. Some are societal—
advertisements that we may hear or see in the course of our day. Others are
professional—e-mails, memos, voice mails, and conversations from our
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colleagues. Others are personal—messages and conversations from our loved
ones and friends. Add these together and it’s easy to see how we may be
receiving more information than we can take in. This state of imbalance is
known as information overload, which can be defined as “occurring when the
information processing demands on an individual’s time to perform
interactions and internal calculations exceed the supply or capacity of time
available for such processing.” [10]
Role overload has been made much more
salient because of the ease at which we can get abundant information from
Web search engines and the numerous e-mail and text messages we receive
each day. [11]
Other research shows that working in such a fragmented fashion
significantly impacts efficiency, creativity, and mental acuity. [12]
Top 10 Stressful Jobs As you can see, some of these jobs are stressful due to high emotional labor
(customer service), physical demands (miner), time pressures (journalist), or
all three (police officer).
1. Inner city high school teacher
2. Police officer
3. Miner
4. Air traffic controller
5. Medical intern
6. Stockbroker
7. Journalist
8. Customer service or complaint worker
9. Secretary
10. Waiter
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Source: Tolison, B. (2008, April 7). Top ten most stressful jobs. Health.
Retrieved January 28, 2009, from the WCTV News Web
site:http://www.wctv.tv/news/headlines/17373899.html.
Work–Family Conflict
Work–family conflict occurs when the demands from work and family are
negatively affecting one another. [13]
Specifically, work and family demands on
a person may be incompatible with each other such that work interferes with
family life and family demands interfere with work life. This stressor has
steadily increased in prevalence, as work has become more demanding and
technology has allowed employees to work from home and be connected to the
job around the clock. In fact, a recent census showed that 28% of the
American workforce works more than 40 hours per week, creating an
unavoidable spillover from work to family life. [14]
Moreover, the fact that more
households have dual-earning families in which both adults work means
household and childcare duties are no longer the sole responsibility of a stay-
at-home parent. This trend only compounds stress from the workplace by
leading to the spillover of family responsibilities (such as a sick child or elderly
parent) to work life. Research shows that individuals who have stress in one
area of their life tend to have greater stress in other parts of their lives, which
can create a situation of escalating stressors. [15]
Work–family conflict has been shown to be related to lower job and life
satisfaction. Interestingly, it seems that work–family conflict is slightly more
problematic for women than men. [16]
Organizations that are able to help their
employees achieve greater work–life balance are seen as more attractive than
those that do not. [17]
Organizations can help employees maintain work–life
balance by using organizational practices such as flexibility in scheduling as
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well as individual practices such as having supervisors who are supportive and
considerate of employees’ family life. [18]
Life Changes
Stress can result from positive and negative life changes. The Holmes-Rahe
scale ascribes different stress values to life events ranging from the death of
one’s spouse to receiving a ticket for a minor traffic violation. The values are
based on incidences of illness and death in the 12 months after each event. On
the Holmes-Rahe scale, the death of a spouse receives a stress rating of 100,
getting married is seen as a midway stressful event, with a rating of 50, and
losing one’s job is rated as 47. These numbers are relative values that allow us
to understand the impact of different life events on our stress levels and their
ability to impact our health and well-being. [19]
Again, because stressors are
cumulative, higher scores on the stress inventory mean you are more prone to
suffering negative consequences of stress than someone with a lower score.
OB Toolbox: How Stressed Are You? Read each of the events listed below. Give yourself the number of points next
to any event that has occurred in your life in the last 2 years. There are no
right or wrong answers. The aim is just to identify which of these events you
have experienced.
Table 7.1 Sample Items: Life Events Stress Inventory
Life event Stress points Life event
Stress points
Death of spouse 100 Foreclosure of mortgage or loan 30
Divorce 73 Change in responsibilities at work 29
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Life event Stress points Life event
Stress points
Marital separation 65 Son or daughter leaving home 29
Jail term 63 Trouble with in-laws 29
Death of close family member 63
Outstanding personal achievement 28
Personal injury or illness 53 Begin or end school 26
Marriage 50 Change in living location/condition 25
Fired or laid off at work 47 Trouble with supervisor 23
Marital reconciliation 45 Change in work hours or conditions 20
Retirement 45 Change in schools 20
Pregnancy 40 Change in social activities 18
Change in financial state 38 Change in eating habits 15
Death of close friend 37 Vacation 13
Change to different line of work 36 Minor violations of the law 11
Scoring:
If you scored fewer than 150 stress points, you have a 30% chance of
developing a stress-related illness in the near future.
If you scored between 150 and 299 stress points, you have a 50% chance of
developing a stress-related illness in the near future.
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If you scored over 300 stress points, you have an 80% chance of developing a
stress-related illness in the near future.
The happy events in this list such as getting married or an outstanding
personal achievement illustrate how eustress, or “good stress,” can also tax a
body as much as the stressors that constitute the traditionally negative
category of distress. (The prefixeu- in the word eustress means “good” or
“well,” much like the eu- in euphoria.) Stressors can also occur in trends. For
example, during 2007, nearly 1.3 million U.S. housing properties were subject
to foreclosure activity, up 79% from 2006.
Source: Adapted from Holmes, T. H., & Rahe, R. H. (1967). The social
readjustment rating scale. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 11, 213–218.
Downsizing
A study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor to examine over
3,600 companies from 1980 to 1994 found that manufacturing firms
accounted for the greatest incidence of major downsizings. The average
percentage of firms by industry that downsized more than 5% of their
workforces across the 15-year period of the study was manufacturing (25%),
retail (17%), and service (15%). A total of 59% of the companies studied fired
at least 5% of their employees at least once during the 15-year period, and 33%
of the companies downsized more than 15% of their workforce at least once
during the period. Furthermore, during the recessions in 1985 to 1986 and
1990 to 1991, more than 25% of all firms, regardless of size, cut their
workforce by more than 5%. [20]
In the United States, major layoffs in many
sectors in 2008 and 2009 were stressful even for those who retained their
jobs.
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The loss of a job can be a particularly stressful event, as you can see by its high
score on the life stressors scale. It can also lead to other stressful events, such
as financial problems, which can add to a person’s stress score. Research
shows that downsizing and job insecurity (worrying about downsizing) is
related to greater stress, alcohol use, and lower performance and
creativity. [21]
For example, a study of over 1,200 Finnish workers found that
past downsizing or expectations of future downsizing was related to greater
psychological strain and absence. [22]
In another study of creativity and
downsizing, researchers found that creativity and most creativity-supporting
aspects of the perceived work environment declined significantly during the
downsizing. [23]
Those who experience layoffs but have their self-integrity
affirmed through other means are less susceptible to negative outcomes. [24]
Outcomes of Stress
The outcomes of stress are categorized into physiological and psychological
and work outcomes.
Physiological
Stress manifests itself internally as nervousness, tension, headaches, anger,
irritability, and fatigue. Stress can also have outward manifestations. Dr. Dean
Ornish, author of Stress, Diet and Your Heart, says that stress is related to
aging. [25]
Chronic stress causes the body to secrete hormones such as cortisol,
which tend to make our complexion blemished and cause wrinkles. Harvard
psychologist Ted Grossbart, author of Skin Deep, says, “Tens of millions of
Americans suffer from skin diseases that flare up only when they’re
upset.” [26]
These skin problems include itching, profuse sweating, warts, hives,
acne, and psoriasis. For example, Roger Smith, the former CEO of General
Motors Corporation, was featured in a Fortune article that began, “His
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normally ruddy face is covered with a red rash, a painless but disfiguring
problem which Smith says his doctor attributes 99% to stress.” [27]
The human body responds to outside calls to action by pumping more blood
through our system, breathing in a more shallow fashion, and gazing wide-
eyed at the world. To accomplish this feat, our bodies shut down our immune
systems. From a biological point of view, it’s a smart strategic move—but only
in the short term. The idea can be seen as your body wanting to escape an
imminent threat, so that there is still some kind of body around to get sick
later. But in the long term, a body under constant stress can suppress its
immune system too much, leading to health problems such as high blood
pressure, ulcers, and being overly susceptible to illnesses such as the common
cold.
The link between heart attacks and stress, while easy to assume, has been
harder to prove. The American Heart Association notes that research has yet
to link the two conclusively. Regardless, it is clear that individuals under stress
engage in behaviors that can lead to heart disease such as eating fatty foods,
smoking, or failing to exercise.
Psychological
Depression and anxiety are two psychological outcomes of unchecked stress,
which are as dangerous to our mental health and welfare as heart disease, high
blood pressure, and strokes. The Harris poll found that 11% of respondents
said their stress was accompanied by a sense of depression. “Persistent or
chronic stress has the potential to put vulnerable individuals at a substantially
increased risk of depression, anxiety, and many other emotional difficulties,”
notes Mayo Clinic psychiatrist Daniel Hall-Flavin. Scientists have noted that
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changes in brain function—especially in the areas of the hypothalamus and the
pituitary gland—may play a key role in stress-induced emotional problems. [28]
Work Outcomes
Stress is related to worse job attitudes, higher turnover, and decreases in job
performance in terms of both in-role performance and organizational
citizenship behaviors. [29]
Research also shows that stressed individuals have
lower organizational commitment than those who are less
stressed. [30]
Interestingly, job challenge has been found to be related to higher
performance, perhaps with some individuals rising to the challenge. [31]
The key
is to keep challenges in the optimal zone for stress—the activation stage—and
to avoid the exhaustion stage. [32]
Figure 7.4
Individuals who are able to find the right balance between work that is too
challenging and work that is not challenging enough see increases in
performance.
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Individual Differences in Experienced Stress
How we handle stress varies by individual, and part of that issue has to do
with our personality type. Type A personalities, as defined by the Jenkins
Activity Survey, [33]
display high levels of speed/impatience, job involvement,
and hard-driving competitiveness. If you think back to Selye’s General
Adaptation Syndrome, in which unchecked stress can lead to illness over time,
it’s easy to see how the fast-paced, adrenaline-pumping lifestyle of a Type A
person can lead to increased stress, and research supports this
view. [34]
Studies show that the hostility and hyper-reactive portion of the Type
A personality is a major concern in terms of stress and negative organizational
outcomes. [35]
Type B personalities, by contrast, are calmer by nature. They think through
situations as opposed to reacting emotionally. Their fight-or-flight and stress
levels are lower as a result. Our personalities are the outcome of our life
experiences and, to some degree, our genetics. Some researchers believe that
mothers who experience a great deal of stress during pregnancy introduce
their unborn babies to high levels of the stress-related hormone cortisol in
utero, predisposing their babies to a stressful life from birth. [36]
Men and women also handle stress differently. Researchers at Yale University
discovered estrogen may heighten women’s response to stress and their
tendency to depression as a result. [37]
Still, others believe that women’s
stronger social networks allow them to process stress more effectively than
men. [38]
So while women may become depressed more often than men,
women may also have better tools for countering emotion-related stress than
their male counterparts.
OB Toolbox: To Cry or Not to Cry? That Is the Question…
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As we all know, stress can build up. Advice that’s often given is to "let it all
out" with something like a cathartic "good cry." But research shows that crying
may not be as helpful as the adage would lead us to believe. In reviewing
scientific studies done on crying and health, Ad Vingerhoets and Jan Scheirs
found that the studies “yielded little evidence in support of the hypothesis that
shedding tears improves mood or health directly, be it in the short or in the
long run.” Another study found that venting actually increased the negative
effects of negative emotion. [39]
Instead, laughter may be the better remedy. Crying may actually intensify the
negative feelings, because crying is a social signal not only to others but to
yourself. “You might think, ‘I didn’t think it was bothering me that much, but
look at how I’m crying—I must really be upset,’” says Susan Labott of the
University of Toledo. The crying may make the feelings more intense. Labott
and Randall Martin of Northern Illinois University at Dekalb surveyed 715
men and women and found that at comparable stress levels, criers were more
depressed, anxious, hostile, and tired than those who wept less. Those who
used humor were the most successful at combating stress. So, if you’re looking
for a cathartic release, opt for humor instead: Try to find something funny in
your stressful predicament.
Sources: Vingerhoets, A. J. J. M., & Scheirs, J. G. M. (2001). Crying and
health. In A. J. J. M. Vingerhoets & R. R. Cornelius (Eds.), Adult crying: A
biopsychosocial approach (pp. 227–247). East Sussex, UK: Brunner-
Routledge; Martin, R., & Susan L. (1991). Mood following emotional crying:
Effects of the situation. Journal of Research in Personality, 25(2), 218–233;
Bostad, R. The crying game. Anchor Point, 1–8. Retrieved June 19, 2008, from
http://www.nlpanchorpoint.com/BolstadCrying1481.pdf
K E Y T A K E A W A Y
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Stress is prevalent in today’s workplaces. The General Adaptation Syndrome consists
of alarm, resistance, and eventually exhaustion if the stress goes on for too long.
Time pressure is a major stressor. Outcomes of stress include both psychological and
physiological problems as well as work outcomes. Individuals with Type B
personalities are less prone to stress. In addition, individuals with social support
experience less stress.
E X E R C I S E S
1. We’ve just seen how the three phases of the General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS)
can play out in terms of physical stresses such as cold and hunger. Can you imagine
how the three categories of this model might apply to work stress as well?
2. List two situations in which a prolonged work challenge might cause an individual to
reach the second and third stage of GAS.
3. What can individuals do to help manage their time better? What works for you?
4. What symptoms of stress have you seen in yourself or your peers?
7.2 Avoiding and Managing Stress
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Understand what individuals can do to manage their own stress.
2. Understand what organizations can do to help their employees avoid and manage
stress.
Individual 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. Jack Groppel was working as a professor
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of kinesiology and bioengineering at the University of Illinois when he became
interested in applying the principles of athletic performance to workplace
performance. Could eating better, exercising more, and developing a positive
attitude turn distress into eustress? Groppel’s answer was yes. If professionals
trained their minds and bodies to perform at peak levels through better
nutrition, focused training, and positive action, Groppel said, they could
become “corporate athletes” working at optimal physical, emotional, and
mental levels.
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 nutritional 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 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.
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Figure 7.5
A key to flow is engaging at work, yet research shows that most managers do
not feel they are engaged in purposeful work.
Sources: Adapted from information in Bruch, H., & Ghoshal, S. (2002,
February). Beware the busy manager. Harvard Business Review, 80, 62–69;
Schiuma, G., Mason, S., & Kennerley, M. (2007). Assessing energy within
organizations. Measuring Business Excellence, 11, 69–78.
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.
Designing Work That Flows Keep in mind that work that flows includes the following:
Challenge: the task is reachable but requires a stretch
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Meaningfulness: the task is worthwhile or important
Competence: the task uses skills that you have
Choice: you have some say in the task and how it’s carried out [1]
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.
Diet
Greasy foods often make a person feel tired. Why? Because it takes the body
longer to digest fats, which means the body is diverting blood from the brain
and making you feel sluggish. Eating big, heavy meals in the middle of the day
may actually slow us down, because the body will be pumping blood to the
stomach, away from the brain. A better choice for lunch might be fish, such as
wild salmon. Fish keeps you alert because of its effect on two important brain
chemicals—dopamine and norepinephrine—which produce a feeling of
alertness, increased concentration, and faster reaction times. [2]
Exercise
Exercise is another strategy for managing stress. The best kind of break to take
may be a physically active one. Research has shown that physically active
breaks lead to enhanced mental concentration and decreased mental fatigue.
One study, conducted by Belgian researchers, examined the effect of breaks on
workers in a large manufacturing company. One-half of the workers were told
to rest during their breaks. The other half did mild calisthenics. Afterward,
each group was given a battery of tests. The group who had done the mild
24
calisthenics scored far better on all measures of memory, decision-making
ability, eye–hand coordination, and fine motor control. [3]
Strange as it may seem, exercise gives us more energy. How energetic we feel
depends on our maximum oxygen capacity (the total amount of oxygen we
utilize from the air we breathe). The more oxygen we absorb in each breath,
the more energy and stamina we will have. Yoga and meditation are other
physical activities that are helpful in managing stress. Regular exercise
increases our body’s ability to draw more oxygen out of the air we breathe.
Therefore, taking physically active breaks may be helpful in combating 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. American
insomnia is a stress-related epidemic—one-third of adults claim to have
trouble sleeping and 37% admit to actually having fallen asleep while driving
in the past year. [4]
The work–life crunch experienced by many Americans makes a good night’s
sleep seem out of reach. According to the journal Sleep, workers who suffer
from insomnia are more likely to miss work due to exhaustion. These missed
days ultimately cost employers thousands of dollars per person in missed
productivity each year, which can total over $100 billion across all
industries. [5]
As you might imagine, 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 the overtired
individual.
25
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. [6]
Research finds that social
support can buffer the effects of stress. [7]
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 to make us 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, manageable 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.
Listen Up and Learn More Check out this interview with Fast Company and Tony Wright, CEO of
RescueTime, who has created a tool to evaluate your productivity using data
from your computer.
http://www.fastcompany.tv/video/see-how-much-tme-you-are-wasting-with-
RescueTime
This software is available at http://www.RescueTime.com/ and is currently
free to use.
Figure 7.7
26
This is an example of output from a RescueTime user.
Source: Used by permission from RescueTime.
Organizational Approaches to Managing Stress
Stress-related issues cost businesses billions of dollars per year in
absenteeism, accidents, and lost productivity. [8]
As a result, managing
employee stress is an important concern for organizations as well as
individuals. For example, Renault, the French automaker, invites consultants
to train their 2,100 supervisors to avoid the outcomes of negative stress for
themselves and their subordinates. IBM Corporation encourages its worldwide
employees to take an online stress assessment that helps them create action
plans based on their results. Even organizations such as General Electric
Company (GE) that are known for a “winner takes all” mentality are seeing the
need to reduce stress. Lately, GE has brought in comedians to lighten up the
workplace atmosphere, and those receiving low performance ratings are no
longer called the “bottom 10s” but are now referred to as the “less
effectives.” [9]
Organizations can take many steps to helping employees with
stress, including having more clear expectations of them, creating jobs where
employees have autonomy and control, and creating a fair work environment.
27
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. [10]
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. [11]
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 both in the United States and
in Hong Kong. [12]
Similarly, in a study of American and French employees,
researchers found that the negative effects of emotional labor were much less
for those employees with the autonomy to customize their work environment
and customer service encounters. [13]
Employees’ stress levels are likely to be
28
related to the degree that organizations can build autonomy and support into
jobs.
Create Fair Work Environments
Work environments that are unfair and unpredictable have been labeled “toxic
workplaces.” A toxic workplace is one in which a company does not value its
employees or treat them fairly. [14]
Statistically, organizations that value
employees are more profitable than those that do not. [15]
Research shows that
working in an environment that is seen as fair helps to buffer the effects of
stress. [16]
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. [17]
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. [18]
Supervisor Support: Work-Family Conflict Survey Think of your current or most recent supervisor and rate each of the following
items in terms of this person’s behavior toward you.
Answer the following questions using 1 = not at all, 2 = somewhat, 3 = fully
agree
1. _____ My supervisor is willing to listen to my problems in juggling work and nonwork life.
2. _____ My supervisor takes the time to learn about my personal needs.
3. _____ My supervisor makes me feel comfortable talking to him or her about my conflicts between work and nonwork.
29
4. _____ My supervisor and I can talk effectively to solve conflicts between work and nonwork issues.
5. _____ I can depend on my supervisor to help me with scheduling conflicts if I need it.
6. _____
I can rely on my supervisor to make sure my work responsibilities are handled when I have unanticipated nonwork demands.
7. _____ My supervisor works effectively with workers to creatively solve conflicts between work and nonwork.
8. _____ My supervisor is a good role model for work and nonwork balance.
9. _____ My supervisor demonstrates effective behaviors in how to juggle work and nonwork balance.
10. _____ My supervisor demonstrates how a person can jointly be successful on and off the job.
11. _____
My supervisor thinks about how the work in my department can be organized to jointly benefit employees and the company.
12. _____ My supervisor asks for suggestions to make it easier for employees to balance work and nonwork demands.
13. _____ My supervisor is creative in reallocating job duties to help my department work better as a team.
14. _____ My supervisor is able to manage the department as a whole team to enable everyone’s needs to be met.
Add up all your ratings to see how your supervisor stacks up.
Score total = _______________
Scoring:
A score of 14 to 23 indicates low levels of supervisor support.
A score of 24 to 33 indicates average levels of supervisor support.
30
A score of 34 to 42 indicates high levels of supervisor support.
Adapted from Hammer, L. B., Kossek, E. E., Yragui, N. L., Bodner, T. E., &
Hanson, G. C. (in press). Development and validation of a multidimensional
measure of family supportive supervisor behaviors (FSSB). Journal of
Management. DOI: 10.1177/0149206308328510. Used by permission of Sage
Publications.
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. Of course, while an estimated 45
million individuals telecommute each year, telecommuting is not for
everyone. [19]
At Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc., those who are interested in
telecommuting are put through a rigorous training program that includes 2
weeks in one of their three home office simulation labs in Florida, New Jersey,
or Manhattan to see if telecommuting is a good fit for the employee.
Employees must also submit photos of their home office and a work plan.
AT&T Inc. estimates that nearly 55% of its U.S.-based managers telecommute
at some point in the week, and this method is also popular with managers
around the world. [20]
A recent survey found that 43% of government workers
now telecommute at least part time. This trend has been growing in reaction
to a law passed by the U.S. Congress in 2000 requiring federal agencies to
offer working from home as an option. [21]
Merrill Lynch has seen higher
productivity, less stress, lower turnover, and higher job satisfaction for those
who telecommute. [22]
A recent meta-analysis of all the studies of
telecommuting (12,883 employees) confirmed researcher findings that the
31
higher autonomy of working from home resulted in lower work–family
conflict for these employees. Even more encouraging were the findings of
higher job satisfaction, better performance, and lower stress as well. [23]
Of
course, telecommuting can also cause potential stress. The keys to successful
telecommuting arrangements are to match the right employees with the right
jobs to 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.
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 such as Genentech Inc., Container Store Inc., and eBay Inc. are
now in the practice of granting paid sabbaticals to their employees. While 11%
of large companies offer paid sabbaticals and 29% offer unpaid sabbaticals,
16% of small companies and 21% of medium-sized companies do the
same. [24]
For example, at PricewaterhouseCoopers International Ltd., you can
apply for a sabbatical after just 2 years on the job if you agree to stay with the
company for at least 1 year following your break. Time off ranges from 3 to 6
months and entails either a personal growth plan or one for social services
where you help others. [25]
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
32
companies offer their employees outside sources of emotional counseling.
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.
K E Y T A K E A W A Y
There are many individual and organizational approaches to decreasing stress and
avoiding negative outcomes. Individuals can control their diet, exercise, and sleep
routines; build a social support network; and practice better time management.
Organizations can help make expectations clear, give employees autonomy, create
fair work environments, consider telecommuting, give employee sabbaticals, and
utilize employee assistance programs.
E X E R C I S E S
1. Have you ever been in a state of “flow” as described in this section? If so, what was
special about this time?
2. Whose responsibility do you think it is to deal with employee stress—the employee
or the organization? Why?
3. Do you think most organizations are fair or unfair? Explain your answer.
4. Have you ever considered telecommuting? What do you think would be the pros and
cons for you personally?
7.3 What Are Emotions?
33
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Understand what defines emotions.
2. Identify the different types of emotions people experience.
3. Understand emotion contagion.
Types of Emotions
Financial analysts measure the value of a company in terms of profits and
stock. For employees, however, the value of a job is also emotional. The root of
the word emotion comes from a French term meaning “to stir up.” And that’s a
great place to begin our investigation of emotions at work. More formally,
an emotion is defined as a short, intense feeling resulting from some event.
Not everyone reacts to the same situation in the same way. For example, a
manager’s way of speaking can cause one person to feel motivated, another to
feel angry, and a third to feel sad. Emotions can influence whether a person is
receptive to advice, whether they quit a job, and how they perform individually
or on a team. [1]
Of course, as you know, emotions can be positive or negative.
Positive emotions such as joy, love, and surprise result from our reaction to
desired events. In the workplace, these events may include achieving a goal or
receiving praise from a superior. Individuals experiencing a positive emotion
may feel peaceful, content, and calm. A positive feeling generates a sensation
of having something you didn’t have before. As a result, it may cause you to
feel fulfilled and satisfied. Positive feelings have been shown to dispose a
person to optimism, and a positive emotional state can make difficult
challenges feel more achievable. [2]
This is because being positive can lead to
upward positive spirals where your good mood brings about positive
outcomes, thereby reinforcing the good mood. [3]
34
Emotions are also useful for creative tasks, because positive individuals tend
to be more creative and open to new ideas. In addition to helping with
employee creativity, companies such as Microsoft Corporation often want to
understand which features of their products produce not just high ratings for
usability but also high emotional ratings. Individuals with strong positive
emotional reactions are more likely to use their product and recommend it to
others. [4]
This is something Apple Inc. has been known for doing well, as their
products tend to evoke strong positive emotions and loyalty from their users.
Negative emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness can result from undesired
events. In the workplace, these events may include not having your opinions
heard, a lack of control over your day-to-day environment, and unpleasant
interactions with colleagues, customers, and superiors. Negative emotions
play a role in the conflict process, with those who can manage their negative
emotions finding themselves in fewer conflicts than those who do not.
The unwanted side effects of negative emotions at work are easy to see: An
angry colleague is left alone to work through the anger; a jealous colleague is
excluded from office gossip, which is also the source of important office news.
But you may be surprised to learn that negative emotions can help a
company’s productivity in some cases. Anger at another company’s success,
for example, can spark a burst of positive effort on behalf of a competitor.
Jealousy about another division’s sales figures may inspire a rival division to
work harder. While negative emotions can be destructive in the workplace,
they can inspire bursts of valuable individual action to change situations that
aren’t working the way they should. [5]
The key is to promote the positive
emotions and work to manage the negative ones so they don’t spread
throughout the organization and become the norm.
35
Emotional Contagion
Both positive and negative emotions can be contagious, with the spillover of
negative emotions lasting longer than positive emotions. [6]
As you may have
experienced in the past, contagion can be especially salient in a team setting.
Research shows that emotions are contagious and that team members affect
one another even after accounting for team performance. [7]
One explanation
for negative emotions’ tendency to linger may be a stronger connection to the
fight-or-flight situations people experience. Anger, fear, and suspicion are
intentionally unpleasant messages urging us to take action immediately. And
to make sure we get the message, these emotions stick around.
Research shows that some people are more susceptible to emotional contagion
than others. [8]
But in general, when the boss is happy, the staff is happy. [9]
We
can also imagine how negative emotions can be transferred. Imagine you’re
working behind the counter at a fast-food restaurant. Your mood is fine, until
a customer argues with you about an order. You argue back. The customer
leaves in a huff. Your anger emotions continue, turning into negative feelings
that last throughout the day. As you might guess, you are more likely to make
mistakes and find ordinary challenges annoying when you’re experiencing
negative emotions. Unchecked, your negative emotions can spread to those
around you. A negative interaction with one customer can spill over onto
interactions with another customer. [10]
OB Toolbox: Practice Changing Your Emotions Olympic athletes train for peak performance by stimulating their brains to
believe they’ve just run a record race. You can do the same thing to experience
different moods. By providing your brain with the external stimulus of
happiness or sadness, you can create those feelings. Give it a try!
36
It’s best to practice this when you are feeling relatively calm. To give yourself a
neutral starting point, close your eyes and breathe in slowly. Now, release your
breath. Open your eyes and smile wide. Allow your eyes to crinkle. Now smile
a bit more.
The changes you have consciously made to your expression are signaling your
body that a positive event has taken place. How does this affect you
emotionally?
Answer these questions to find out:
Do you feel more or less energetic as you smile? More or less calm? More or
less optimistic? How does the feeling resulting from your physical changes
compare with your feelings a moment before?
Now, let’s try the opposite: Close your eyes and breathe in and out slowly, as
detailed above, to clear your “emotional slate.” Then open your eyes. Pull
down the corners of your mouth. Open your eyes wide. You have just signaled
to your body that something negative has taken place.
Note your feelings using the list above. How do these feelings compare with
your feelings of “intentional happiness”?
Now consider this: Dr. Aston Trice of Mary Baldwin College in Virginia found
that humor has mood-altering effects. Subjects were given a frustrating task.
Then, one-half were shown cartoons. Those who had seen the cartoons
overcame their frustration and attacked a new test with renewed enthusiasm
and confidence, compared to those subjects who hadn’t had the humorous
interlude. [11]
K E Y T A K E A W A Y
37
Emotions serve many purposes and affect people at work. There are positive and
negative emotions, and both can be helpful at motivating us to work harder.
Emotions are malleable and they can also be contagious.
E X E R C I S E S
1. How easy do you think it is to “manage” one’s emotions?
2. Which types of emotions are most socially accepted in the workplace? Why do you
think this is?
3. What are factors that affect your emotions?
4. Share an example of either positive or negative emotional contagion. How did it start
and stop?
5. What do you do, if anything, to try to change how you are feeling? How effective are
your strategies?
7.4 Emotions at Work
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Understand Affective Events Theory.
2. Understand the influence of emotions on attitudes and behaviors at work.
3. Learn what emotional labor is and how it affects individuals.
4. Learn what emotional intelligence is.
Emotions Affect Attitudes and Behaviors at Work
Emotions shape an individual’s belief about the value of a job, a company, or a
team. Emotions also affect behaviors at work. Research shows that individuals
within your own inner circle are better able to recognize and understand your
emotions. [1]
38
So, what is the connection between emotions, attitudes, and behaviors at
work? This connection may be explained using a theory named Affective
Events Theory (AET). Researchers Howard Weiss and Russell Cropanzano
studied the effect of six major kinds of emotions in the workplace: anger, fear,
joy, love, sadness, and surprise. [2]
Their theory argues that specific events on
the job cause different kinds of people to feel different emotions. These
emotions, in turn, inspire actions that can benefit or impede others at work. [3]
Figure 7.11
According to Affective Events Theory, six emotions are affected by events at
work.
For example, imagine that a coworker unexpectedly delivers your morning
coffee to your desk. As a result of this pleasant, if unexpected experience, you
may feel happy and surprised. If that coworker is your boss, you might feel
proud as well. Studies have found that the positive feelings resulting from
39
work experience may inspire you to do something you hadn’t planned to do
before. For instance, you might volunteer to help a colleague on a project you
weren’t planning to work on before. Your action would be an affect-
driven behavior. [4]
Alternatively, if you were unfairly reprimanded by your
manager, the negative emotions you experience may cause you to withdraw
from work or to act mean toward a coworker. Over time, these tiny moments
of emotion on the job can influence a person’s job satisfaction. Although
company perks and promotions can contribute to a person’s happiness at
work, satisfaction is not simply a result of this kind of “outside-in” reward
system. Job satisfaction in the AET model comes from the inside-in—from the
combination of an individual’s personality, small emotional experiences at
work over time, beliefs, and affect-driven behaviors.
Jobs that are high in negative emotion can lead to frustration and burnout—an
ongoing negative emotional state resulting from dissatisfaction. [5]
Depression,
anxiety, anger, physical illness, increased drug and alcohol use, and insomnia
can result from frustration and burnout, with frustration being somewhat
more active and burnout more passive. The effects of both conditions can
impact coworkers, customers, and clients as anger boils over and is expressed
in one’s interactions with others. [6]
Emotional Labor
Negative emotions are common among workers in service industries.
Individuals who work in manufacturing rarely meet their customers face-to-
face. If they’re in a bad mood, the customer would not know. Service jobs are
just the opposite. Part of a service employee’s job is appearing a certain way in
the eyes of the public. Individuals in service industries are professional
helpers. As such, they are expected to be upbeat, friendly, and polite at all
times, which can be exhausting to accomplish in the long run.
40
Humans are emotional creatures by nature. In the course of a day, we
experience many emotions. Think about your day thus far. Can you identify
times when you were happy to deal with other people and times that you
wanted to be left alone? Now imagine trying to hide all the emotions you’ve
felt today for 8 hours or more at work. That’s what cashiers, school teachers,
massage therapists, fire fighters, and librarians, among other professionals,
are asked to do. As individuals, they may be feeling sad, angry, or fearful, but
at work, their job title trumps their individual identity. The result is a
persona—a professional role that involves acting out feelings that may not be
real as part of their job.
Emotional labor refers to the regulation of feelings and expressions for
organizational purposes. [7]
Three major levels of emotional labor have been
identified. [8]
1. Surface acting requires an individual to exhibit physical signs, such as
smiling, that reflect emotions customers want to experience. A
children’s hairdresser cutting the hair of a crying toddler may smile and
act sympathetic without actually feeling so. In this case, the person is
engaged in surface acting.
2. Deep acting takes surface acting one step further. This time, instead of
faking an emotion that a customer may want to see, an employee will
actively try to experience the emotion they are displaying. This genuine
attempt at empathy helps align the emotions one is experiencing with
the emotions one is displaying. The children’s hairdresser may
empathize with the toddler by imagining how stressful it must be for one
so little to be constrained in a chair and be in an unfamiliar
41
environment, and the hairdresser may genuinely begin to feel sad for the
child.
3. Genuine acting occurs when individuals are asked to display emotions
that are aligned with their own. If a job requires genuine acting, less
emotional labor is required because the actions are consistent with true
feelings.
Figure 7.12
When it comes to acting, the closer to the middle of the circle that your actions
are, the less emotional labor your job demands. The further away, the more
emotional labor the job demands.
Research shows that surface acting is related to higher levels of stress and
fewer felt positive emotions, while deep acting may lead to less
stress. [9]
Emotional labor is particularly common in service industries that are
also characterized by relatively low pay, which creates the added potentials for
stress and feelings of being treated unfairly. [10]
In a study of 285 hotel
42
employees, researchers found that emotional labor was vital because so many
employee-customer interactions involve individuals dealing with emotionally
charged issues. [11]
Emotional laborers are required to display specific
emotions as part of their jobs. Sometimes, these are emotions that the worker
already feels. In that case, the strain of the emotional labor is minimal. For
example, a funeral director is generally expected to display sympathy for a
family’s loss, and in the case of a family member suffering an untimely death,
this emotion may be genuine. But for people whose jobs require them to be
professionally polite and cheerful, such as flight attendants, or to be serious
and authoritative, such as police officers, the work of wearing one’s “game
face” can have effects that outlast the working day. To combat this, taking
breaks can help surface actors to cope more effectively. [12]
In addition,
researchers have found that greater autonomy is related to less strain for
service workers in the United States as well as France. [13]
Cognitive dissonance is a term that refers to a mismatch among emotions,
attitudes, beliefs, and behavior, for example, believing that you should always
be polite to a customer regardless of personal feelings, yet having just been
rude to one. You’ll experience discomfort or stress unless you find a way to
alleviate the dissonance. You can reduce the personal conflict by changing
your behavior (trying harder to act polite), changing your belief (maybe it’s OK
to be a little less polite sometimes), or by adding a new fact that changes the
importance of the previous facts (such as you will otherwise be laid off the
next day). Although acting positive can make a person feel positive, emotional
labor that involves a large degree of emotional or cognitive dissonance can be
grueling, sometimes leading to negative health effects. [14]
43
Emotional Intelligence
One way to manage the effects of emotional labor is by increasing your
awareness of the gaps between real emotions and emotions that are required
by your professional persona. “What am I feeling? And what do others feel?”
These questions form the heart ofemotional intelligence. The term was coined
by psychologists Peter Salovey and John Mayer and was popularized by
psychologist Daniel Goleman in a book of the same name. Emotional
intelligence looks at how people can understand each other more completely
by developing an increased awareness of their own and others’ emotions. [15]
There are four building blocks involved in developing a high level of emotional
intelligence. Self-awareness exists when you are able to accurately perceive,
evaluate, and display appropriate emotions. Self-management exists when you
are able to direct your emotions in a positive way when needed. Social
awareness exists when you are able to understand how others feel.
Relationship management exists when you are able to help others manage
their own emotions and truly establish supportive relationships with
others. [16]
Figure 7.13
44
The four steps of emotional intelligence build upon one another.
In the workplace, emotional intelligence can be used to form harmonious
teams by taking advantage of the talents of every member. To accomplish this,
colleagues well versed in emotional intelligence can look for opportunities to
motivate themselves and inspire others to work together. [17]
Chief among the
emotions that helped create a successful team, Goleman learned, was
empathy—the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes, whether that individual
has achieved a major triumph or fallen short of personal goals. [18]
Those high
in emotional intelligence have been found to have higher self-efficacy in
coping with adversity, perceive situations as challenges rather than threats,
and have higher life satisfaction, which can all help lower stress levels. [19]
K E Y T A K E A W A Y
Emotions affect attitudes and behaviors at work. Affective Events Theory can help
explain these relationships. Emotional labor is higher when one is asked to act in a
way that is inconsistent with personal feelings. Surface acting requires a high level of
45
emotional labor. Emotional intelligence refers to understanding how others are
reacting to our emotions.
E X E R C I S E S
1. What is the worst job you have ever had (or class project if you haven’t worked)? Did
the job require emotional labor? If so, how did you deal with it?
2. Research shows that acting “happy” when you are not can be exhausting. Why do
you think that is? Have you ever felt that way? What can you do to lessen these
feelings?
3. How important do you think emotional intelligence is at work? Why?
7.5 The Role of Ethics and National Culture
L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S
1. Consider the role of ethics and emotion.
2. Consider the role of national culture on stress.
Emotions and Ethics
We have seen before how a gap between our true feelings and the feelings we
display at work can cause distress. What happens when there is a gap between
our feelings and our true beliefs?
Joshua Greene is a philosopher and neuroscientist who uses magnetic imaging
of the brain to show how our minds and bodies react to difficult questions. In
one example, Greene asked a group of subjects to consider a situation in which
a trolley is racing down a track, about to kill five people. The subjects have the
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ability to steer the trolley onto another track, where it will kill only one person.
Most agree this feels like the right thing to do—the best of possible evils.
Greene then asks his subject to consider the same situation with one major
shift: In this case, to save the five bystanders the subject must push a large
man in front of the trolley to stop it in its tracks.
This time, Greene’s subjects felt the sacrifice was emotionally wrong. Greene’s
research shows that the difference between his subjects’ valuations of life in
these cases was that the second was more emotional. The thought of pushing
someone to his death, understandably, had brought up strong feelings among
the group. If humans were computers, one person’s death might be seen as
“less bad” than the death of five. But human decisions are based on emotion.
It was considered emotionally—and therefore, morally—unacceptable to push
the man in front of the trolley to save five others.
Greene’s magnetic images of his subject’s brains showed that while
considering the second scenario, people were using more of their brains.
Greene writes, “These differences in emotional engagement affect people’s
judgments.” [1]
Emotions are a powerful force in work and life. They are spontaneous and
unpredictable elements of human beings that separate us from machines, and
in some moments, from one another. By learning to identify and maximize the
uses of our emotions at work, we can more appropriately respond to emotional
situations.
Lack of Leisure Time and Stress Around the Globe
As economist Steven Landsburg notes, “Compared with Europeans,
Americans are more likely to be employed and more likely to work longer
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hours—employed Americans put in about 3 hours more per week than
employed Frenchmen. Most important, Americans take fewer (and shorter)
vacations.” [2]
That is, if they take a vacation at all. A recent poll showed that
40% of Americans do not plan to take a vacation within the next year. [3]
Juliet Schor, a senior lecturer in economics and director of women’s studies at
Harvard University, adds to the portrait of the overworked American with a
shocking statistic on Americans’ free time. According to Schor’s book, The
Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, Americans have
16.5 hours per week of leisure time after their work and household obligations
are fulfilled. [4]
This is a huge concern, as research has established that
recovery is a key to well-being and that the lack of recovery can lead to health
concerns associated with stress. [5]
Even more challenged for leisure time are
some Japanese employees, working an average of 236 more hours per year
than their American counterparts and 500 more hours than employees in
France or Germany. [6]
Leisure and recovery are key aspects to remaining
healthy throughout one’s lifetime.
While Europeans normally plan on taking the month of August off, Americans
do not have a similar ritual. PricewaterhouseCoopers became so concerned
that they have instituted a 10-day shutdown as a winter break and a 5-day
shutdown around July 4 so that everyone takes that time off without feeling
peer pressure to work through vacations.
K E Y T A K E A W A Y
Emotions play a role in shaping what we feel is ethical and what is not. Leisure time
is important for avoiding the exhaustion phase of the stress cycle. Countries vary a
great deal in how many hours the average worker puts in at work, with Japan
working the most hours, followed by those in the United States.
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E X E R C I S E S
1. Explain a time when you have seen emotions help someone to be more ethical than
they might have otherwise been.
2. Explain a time when you have seen emotions help someone to be less ethical than
they might have otherwise been.
3. Why do you think some countries have so much vacation time compared to others?
In your opinion, is this a problem or not? Why?
7.6 Conclusion Stress is a major concern for individuals and organizations. Exhaustion is the
outcome of prolonged stress. Individuals and organizations can take many
approaches to lessening the negative health and work outcomes associated
with being overstressed. Emotions play a role in organizational life.
Understanding these emotions helps individuals to manage them. Emotional
labor can be taxing on individuals, while emotional intelligence may help
individuals cope with the emotional demands of their jobs.
7.7 Exercises
E T H I C A L D I L E M M A
You work at a paper supply company that employs fifty people. A coworker, Karen, is
not your favorite person to work with. She is often late to work, can be
unprofessional with coworkers, and isn’t someone you can routinely count on to go
above and beyond her job duties. Last week you even noticed that her breath
smelled like alcohol when you spoke to her about some last-minute orders that
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needed to be filled. But, you don’t like to rock the boat and you don’t like to be
disloyal to your coworkers, so you didn’t say anything. However, David Chan just
approached you and asked whether you smelled alcohol on Karen’s breath last
Thursday. You are surprised and ask him why. David mentions that he heard some
gossip and wants to confirm if it is true or not.
What will you do?
1. Should you admit you smelled alcohol on Karen’s breath last week? Why or why not?
2. What are the implications of each course of action?
3. Would you change your answer if, instead of working at a paper supply company,
you worked as a nurse?
I N D I V I D U A L E X E R C I S E
Time Management Quiz
Please answer true or false for each of the statements according to how you
currently manage your time.
1. True or false: I sort my mail when it comes in, open it, place it in a folder, and deal
with it when I am ready to.
2. True or false: I do what my boss asks me to do immediately.
3. True or false: I don’t take breaks because they waste time.
4. True or false: I answer the phone when it rings regardless of what I am doing.
5. True or false: I check my e-mails as soon as they arrive.
6. True or false: I create a “to do” list at the start of every day.
7. True or false: I do my “heavy thinking” at the end of the day when things have
calmed down.
8. True or false: I don’t like to take vacations because making up the work is always too
stressful.
9. True or false: Multitasking helps me be more effective at work.
10. True or false: I don’t have to organize my office, since I always know where things
are.
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G R O U P E X E R C I S E
Time Management Analysis
Create List 1:
List 10 activities you did at work (or at school) yesterday.
Create List 2:
List 5 things you think are key to doing your job well (or doing well in school).
Compare Lists:
Now, look at both lists and write down which items from List 1 relate to List 2.
Place each activity from List 1 on the following grid.
Figure 7.14
Group Discussion
Now, as a group, discuss the following questions:
1. What trends in your time management style did you notice?
2. How much of your “work” time is being spent on things that are directly related to
doing well in your work or at school?
3. What works well for you in terms of time management?
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4. What steps could you take to improve your time management?
5. How could your group help one another with time management?
