Occupational
Stress
 Before proceeding, answer the following questions to get a better handle on
occupational stress. If you are presently employed, answer these questions as they relate to your job. If you
are not working now but have worked, answer these questions as they relate to your last job.
- How often do you feel that you have too little authority to carry out your
responsibilities?
- How often do you think that the amount of work you have to do may interfere
with how well it is done?
- How often do you not know what opportunities for advancement or promotion
exists for you?
- How often do you think you will not be able to satisfy the conflicting
demands of various people around you?
- How often do you worry about decisions that affect the lives of people you
know?
- How often do you feel unable to influence your immediate supervisor's
decisions and actions that affect you?
- How often do you feel that your job affects your family
life?
- How often do you feel that you may not be liked and accepted by people at
work?
What Is Occupational Stress?
Occupational stress is an extremely difficult construct to define. Obviously, it is
stress on the job, but stress on the job occurs in a person. Here is where we run into problems, since any worker
brings to the job a level of predisposition to be stressed. Several sources of occupational stress exist. Some of
these stressors are intrinsic to the job. Some are related to the employee's role within the organization, some to
career development, some to relationships at work, and some to the structure and climate of the
organization.
Interacting with these work stressors are the individual's characteristics. These
are brought to the workplace rather than being a function of it, but they are important ingredients in occupational
stress, nevertheless. These characteristics include the worker's level of anxiety and neuroticism, tolerance of
ambiguity, and Type A behavior pattern.
Added to the brew are the sources of stress that come from outside the workplace
and outside the worker. These extra organizational sources of stress come from family problems, life crises,
financial matters, and environmental factors. Mix it all up and out come symptoms of occupational health problems
that may develop into full-blown disease. Different workers have different levels of anxiety and tolerances of
ambiguity, and different workers experience different amounts of family and financial problems. To assume that all
of these ingredients can be quantified is naïve.
Why Is Occupational Stress Of Concern?
One of the reasons why occupational stress has been receiving so much attention of
late is that businesses are genuinely beginning to care about employee welfare. You don't buy that? Well, how about
this? Work stress is costing businesses billions of dollars.
It is estimated by the International Labor Organization that stress on the job
costs businesses over $200 billion annually. These costs include salaries for sick days, costs of hospitalization
and outpatient care, and costs related to decreased productivity. Other stress-related factors are catching the
eyes of business leaders. For instance, health-benefit costs to employers have increased dramatically.
Employees trained over a long period of time, at great cost, may break down when
stressed on the job. They may make poor decisions, miss days of work, begin abusing alcohol and other drugs, or die
and have to be replaced by other workers who need training. All of these are costly.
American businesses have taken note of employer-employee relationships. Fear of
government regulation in support of employee health has led some businesses to act now rather than "under the gun"
later. In an attempt to attract the best employees, some companies have beefed up their fringe-benefit packages.
Programs to reduce occupational stress and promote physical fitness are included as such inducements.
Job Dissatisfaction
 The factors that are typically thought related to dissatisfaction on the job
are salary and conditions of the workplace. However, even if workers were paid well and worked in hygienic
conditions, they might still be dissatisfied. A class of work related factors, called motivational factors can
affect job dissatisfaction. These factors include the degree of stimulating tasks involved, the amount of
recognition for jobs done well, relationships with fellow workers, and the amount of encouragement to take on
responsibility.
The Workaholic
Too much work, even if you enjoy it, can itself be an occupational stressor. Some
of us either enjoy our work so much or find so little pleasure in our nonworking lives that we immerse ourselves in
our jobs.
Workaholics have the following characteristics:
- Tend to become energetic and intense
- Prefer work to play
- Sleep less than most people
- Tend to blur the distinction between work and play
- Have difficulty taking vacations
- Can and do work anywhere and everywhere
- Spend most of their waking time working
- Frequently eat while they work
- Work hard at making the most of their time
To combat workaholism, try these tips:
- Focus on the work you most love doing, and try to find ways to stop doing,
delegate, or minimize the parts of your work that you dislike.
- Try to stay in touch with the positive aspects of your work; the pleasure of
doing work that fulfills you, the freedom, the opportunity to be of service to others, or other aspects of your
work you find rewarding.
- Ask yourself, "What work would I do for free?" Then try to evolve your work
in that direction.
- Schedule open time into your work life. If, for instance, you now schedule
work-related appointments every thirty minutes, try to evolve toward scheduling them every forty-five minutes
instead.
- Decorate your workplace to create an environment that pleases you. You
deserve it.
- Build friendships at work. Arrange to spend quality time with
coworkers.
- Use your time; don't let it use you. Decide how much time you want to spend
working, and then limit your work time accordingly. For example, you might arrange to stop working at 5:30 pm
by making a commitment to go running with a friend every workday at 5:45.
- Learn to say "no" to demands on your time. If this is difficult, say that
you'd like some time to think about it, then say "no" later.
- Heavy involvement in work usually entitles you to have a good deal to say
about the way you work. How might you change or restructure your work to make it more
fulfilling?
The workaholic enjoys work and, therefore, might not notice the harm it is doing.
The family often suffers more than the workaholic since time is taken away from them. Family responsibilities are
also added to them because of the workaholic's work style. To intervene between workaholism and poor family health,
time should be scheduled for family activities that will get the workaholic away from the telephone and job
commitments.
Burnout
Too much work or frequent frustration at work can lead to a syndrome of physical and
emotional exhaustion. This syndrome is called burnout. Burnout is an adverse work stress reaction with
psychological, psychophysiological, and behavioral components. Moreover, burnout appears to be a major factor in
low worker morale, high absenteeism and job turnover rates, physical illness and distress, increased alcohol and
drug use, marital and family conflict, and various other problems.
The symptoms of burnout include:
- Internal changes: emotional exhaustion, loss of self-esteem, depression,
frustration, and a trapped feeling
- Self-medication: increased use of alcohol, tranquilizers, and other
mood-altering drugs
- Changed job performance: increased absenteeism, tardiness, use of sick leave,
and decreased efficiency or productivity
- Social withdrawal: pulling away from coworkers, peers, and family
members
- Increased physical complaints: fatigue, irritability, muscle tension, stomach
upset, and susceptibility to illness
- Increased overtime and no vacation: indispensable to the organization,
reluctant to say no to working on scheduled off-days
- Skipping rest and food breaks: continually having no time for coffee or lunch
breaks to restore stamina
- Diminished sense of humor: inability to laugh at daily, on the job
situations
- Pessimism, paranoia, rigidity, callousness, feelings of loneliness, guilt,
and difficulty in making and explaining decisions
If you dislike your job and it is causing you to either feel ill or behave in ways
that are detrimental to your career and/or home life, you can always quit that job. Short of that, you can ask for
a change in job responsibilities, or you can request a less stressful job within the same organization. If you are
experiencing burnout, learn to organize your time better and to say no when asked to take on additional jobs. Here
are some rules that might help:
- Don't take work home
- Do not discuss business over lunch
- Take a full lunch hour
- Discuss your feelings about occupational stress with whomever is close by
whenever those feelings develop
Recognizing that your perceptions of your occupational stress are as important as
actual events precipitating that stress, you will need to intervene in these perceptions. These suggestions should
help:
- Look for humor in your stressors at work.
- Try to see things for what they really are.
- Distinguish between need and desire.
- Separate your self-worth from the task.
- Identify situations and employ the appropriate style of
coping.
Managing Occupational Stress
In conclusion, occupational stress may be difficult to define and measure because
of the personal stressors people bring to their jobs and their varying personality characteristics, but we all know
when we are experiencing it. Fortunately, we can manage occupational stress by using the stress model to set up
roadblocks between occupational stress and illness and disease.
We can change jobs, perceive the stressors associated with our jobs as challenges
rather than burdens to bear (perception intervention), practice relaxation techniques, and exercise regularly to
use up the accumulated products of stress. However, anything we do is our own choice. Grinning and bearing it won't
help; neither will always complaining about our jobs or our bosses.
On the next page we will examine the
link between Occupational Stress and Disease.
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