HANDOUT-2 JOB STRESS

WHAT IS JOB STRESS?

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, job stress can be defined
as the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of the job do
not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker. Job stress can lead to poor health
and even injury.

Job stress is often linked or equated with challenge, but the two are very different. Challenge
motivates and energizes us psychologically and physically to learn new skills and master given
tasks. When a challenge is met, we feel a great sense of accomplishment. We feel relaxed and
satisfied. Challenge is beneficial in the work environment as it helps increase productivity. This is
what people are referring to when they say - "a little bit of stress is good for you." It might be
more accurate to say - "a little challenge is good for you."

Stress, on the other hand, is when job demands can't be met, relaxation has turned
to exhaustion, and a sense of satisfaction has turned into feelings of tension. In short, the worker
feels overly taxed both psychologically and physically, and the stage is set for illness, injury, and
job failure.

SYMPTOMS OF STRESS

Physiological
Ulcers
Digestive problems
Headaches
S High blood pressure
T Sleep disruption
R Psychological
E Emotional instability
S Moodiness
S Nervousness and tension
Chronic worry
Depression
Burnout
Behavioral
Excessive smoking
Abuse of alcohol or drugs
Absenteeism
Aggression
Safety problems
Performance problems

JOB RELATED CAUSES OF STRESS

Almost any job condition can cause stress, depending on an employees reaction to it. For
example, an employee will accept a new work procedure and feel little or no stress, while another
experiences overwhelming pressure from the same task. Part of the difference lies in each
employees experiences, general outlooks, and expectations, which are all internal factor. Some
job condition, however, frequently cause stress for employee. Major one are shown in Figure
below:
 Work overload
Time pressures
Poor quality of supervision
Insecure job climate
Lack of personal control
Inadequate authority to match responsibilities
Role conflict and ambiguity
Differences between company and employee values
TYPICAL Change of any type, especially when it is major of unusual
CAUSES OF
Frustration
STRESS ON
THE JOB Technology with inadequate training or support

Work overload and time deadlines put employees under pressure and lead to stress. Often these
pressures arise from management, and a poor quality of management can cause stress.
Role conflict and ambiguity are also related to stress. In situations of this type, people have
different expectations of an employees activities on a job, so the employee does not know what
to do and cannot meet all expectations. In addition, since the job often is poorly defined, the
employee has no official model on which to depend.
A further cause of stress lies in differences between company values and ethical practice, as
often reflected in the organizations culture, and employee ethics and values. Substantial
differences can lead to significant mental stress as an effort is made to balance the requirements
of both sets of values.
Another cause of stress is frustration. It is a result of a motivation being blocked to prevent one
from reaching a desired goal. Imagine that you are trying to finish a report by quitting time, but
one interference after another requires your attention and your time. By the middle of the after-
noon, when you see that your goal for the day may not be reached, you are likely to become
frustrated.

APPROACHES TO STRESS MANAGEMENT

Both organizations and individuals are highly concerned abbot stress and its effects. In
attempting to manage stress they have three broad options:
1. Prevent or control it: Organizations can seek to improve managerial communications skills,
empower employees through participation, redesign jobs to be more fulfilling, or implement
organization development programs. These steps are aimed at reducing or eliminating
stressors for employees.
2. Escape from it: Other employees can escape stress by requesting job transfers, finding
alternative employment, taking early retirement, or acquiring assertiveness skills that allow
them to confront the stressor.
3. Learn to adapt to it (handle its symptoms): Several approaches exist for coping with stress.
These often involve cooperative efforts among employees and management and may
include:
Social support,
Relaxation efforts,
Sabbaticals, and
Personal wellness programs.
Social Support:
A powerful antidote to stress lies in the presence of social support at work. Social support is the
network of helpful activities, interactions, and relationships that provides an employee with the
satisfaction of important needs. There are four types of support in a total network: instrumental
(task assistance), informational evaluative and emotional. Social sport may come from
supervisors, co-workers, friends or family. Its focus may be on either work tasks or social
exchanges and may even take the form of games, jokes, or teasing.
Supervisors- male or female- need to develop the capacity to play this role for their employees
when support is needed. An alternative action is to simply provide opportunities for social support
and encourage it to develop among a group of workers. Managers may need to allow time for
employees to develop and nurture their social support networks at work.
Relaxation
Some employees have turned to various means of mental relaxation to adjust to the stresses in
their lives. Patterned after the practice of meditation, the relaxation response involves quiet,
concentrated inner thought in order to rest the body physically and emotionally. It helps remove
people temporarily from the stressful world and reduces their symptoms of stress.
The ideal ingredients of this relaxation effort involve:
A comfortable position in a relatively quiet location
Closed eyes and deep, comfortable breaths
Repetition of a peaceful word, or focus on a pleasant mental image
Avoidance of distracting thoughts and negative events
Soothing background music
Practicing a simple relaxation response is like taking a time-out at work. It requires only a few
minutes and can be especially fruitful just before or after a tense encounter. It is so highly
regarded that a few organizations have established special lunges for employee se, and many
employees who se them for momentary relaxation report favorable results regarding their
capacity to deal with stress.
Sabbaticals
Whereas relaxation may help us cope with stress, sometimes it is wisest to at least temporarily
remove employees from it. Some employers, recognizing this need for employees to escape,
have created programs allowing sabbatical leaves to encourage stress relief and personal
education.
Most employees return emotionally refreshed feel rewarded and valued by their employers, and
often bring back new perspectives gained from readings and workshops. A side benefit
sometimes reported is the cross-training that takes place among colleagues while one employee
is sabbatical. This side effect adds to organizational flexibility and raises employee competency
and self-esteem.
Personal Wellness
In-house programs of preventive maintenance for personal wellness, based on research in
behavioral medicine, are increasingly popular. Corporate wellness centers may include disease
screening health education and fitness centers. Health care specialists can recommend practices
to encourage changes in lifestyle such as breathing regulation muscle relaxation positive imagery
nutrition management and exercise enabling employees to use more of their full potential.
 HANDOUT-2 EMPLOYEE COUNSELLING

WHAT IS COUNSELING?
Counseling is discussion with an employee of a problem that usually has emotional content in
order to help the employee cope with it better. Counseling seeks to improve employee mental
health. As we know, good mental health means that people feel comfortable about themselves,
right about other people, and able to meet the demands of life.
The definition of counseling implies a number of characteristics. It is an exchange of ideas and
feelings between two people, nominally a counselor and a counselee, so it is an act of
communication. Since it helps employees cope with problems, it should improve organizational
performance, because the employee becomes more cooperative, worries less about personal
problems, or improves in other ways. Emphasis on counseling also helps the organization
become more human and considerate of peoples problems.
Counseling may be performed by both professionals and nonprofessionals. For example, both a
human resource specialist in counseling and a supervisor who is not trained in counseling may
counsel employees.
Counseling usually is confidential so that employees will feel free to talk openly about their
problems. It also involves both job and personal problems, since both types of problems may
affect an employees performance on the job.

WHAT COUNSELING CAN DO

The general objectives of counseling are to help employees grow in self-confidence,
understanding, self-control, and ability to work effectively. These objectives are consistent with
the supportive, collegial, and system models of organizational behavior, which encourage
employee growth and self-direction. They are also consistent with Maslows higher-order needs
and Alderfers growth needs, such as self-esteem and self-actualization.
The counseling objective is achieved through one or more of the following counseling functions:
FUNCTIONS OF COUNSELING

1. Advice Telling a person what you thing should be done, coaching

2. Reassurance Giving people courage and confidence that they are capable of
facing a problem
3. Communication Providing information and understanding
4. Release of Helping a person feel more free of frustrations and stress
emotional tension
6. Clarified thinking Encouraging more coherent, rational, and mature thought

7. Reorientation Encouraging an internal change in goals, values, and mental models

1. Advice
Many people view counseling as primarily an advice-giving activity, but in reality this is only one
of several functions that counseling can perform. To give useful advice requires a counselor to
make judgments about a counselees problems and to lay out a course of action. Herein lies the
difficulty, because understanding another persons complicated problems, much less telling that
person what to do about them, it is almost impossible. Advice giving may breed a relationship in
which the counselee feels inferior and dependent on the counselor. In spite of all its ills, advice
occurs in routine counseling because workers expect it and managers like to provide it.
2. Reassurance
Counseling can provide employees with reassurance, which is a way of giving them courage to
face a problem or a feeling of confidence that they are pursuing a suitable course of action.
3. Communication
Counseling can improve both upward and downward communication. In an upward direction, it is
a key way for employees to express their feelings to management. As many people have said,
often the top managers in an organization do not know how those at the bottom feel. The act of
counseling initiates an upward signal and if the channels are open, some of these signals will
travel higher. Individual names must be kept confidential, but statements of feeling can be
grouped and interpreted to management.
4. Release of Emotional Tension
An important function of nearly all counseling is release of emotional tension; this release is
sometimes called emotional catharsis. People tend to get an emotional release from their
frustrations and other problems whenever they have an opportunity to tell someone about them.
Counseling history consistently shows that as people begin to explain their problems to a
sympathetic listener, their tensions begin to subside.
5. Clarified Thinking
Clarified thinking tends to be a normal result of emotional release, but a skilled counselor can aid
this process. In order to clarify the counselees thinking, the counselor serves as an aid only and
refrains from telling the counselee what is right. Further, the clarified thinking may not even take
place while the counselor and counselee are talking. Part or all of it may take place later as a
result of developments during the counseling relationships. The result of any clarified thinking is
that a person is encouraged to accept responsibility for emotional problems and to be more
realistic in solving them.
6. Reorientation
Another function of counseling is reorientation of the counselee. This is more than mere
emotional release or clear thinking about a problem. Reorientation involves a change in the
employees psychic self through a change in basic goals and values. For example, it can help
people recognize and accept their own limitations.

TYPES OF COUNSELING
In terms of the amount of direction that a counselor gives a counselee, counseling can be viewed
as a continuum from full direction (directive counseling) to no direction (nondirective counseling).
Between the two extremes is participative counseling. These three counseling types are
discussed in order to show how counselors may vary their direction in a counseling situation.
Nondirective Participative Directive
counseling counseling counseling

No Full
direction direction
Directive Counseling is the process of listening to an employees problem, deciding with the
employee what should be done, and then telling and motivating the employee to do it.
Directive counseling mostly accomplishes the counseling function of advice, but it also may
reassure, communicate, give emotional release, andto a minor extentclarify thinking.
Reorientation is seldom achieved in directive counseling.
 Nondirective, or client-centered, counseling is at the opposite end of the continuum. It is
the process of skillfully listening to and encouraging a counselee to explain troublesome
problems, understand them, and determine appropriate solutions. It focuses on the
counselee rather than on the counselor as judge and adviser; thus it is client-centered.
Participating Counseling (also called cooperative counseling) is a mutual counselor-
counselee relationship that establishes a cooperative exchange of ideas to help solve a
counselees problems. It is neither wholly counselor-centered nor wholly counselee-centered.
Rather, the counselor and counselee mutually apply their different knowledge, perspectives,
and values to problems. It integrates the ideas of both participants in a counseling
relationship.
MAJOR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN NONDIRECTIVE AND DIRECTIVE COUNSELING
Nondirective Counseling Directive Counseling

Counseling method The employee primarily The counselor primarily

controls the direction of the controls the direction of the
conversation and does most of conversation and does most
the talking. of the talking.

Responsibility for solution Employee Counselor

Status of participants The employee and the The counselor is at least

counselor are on an equal implicitly superior to the
level. employee.

Role of participants The employee is The employee is

psychologically independent
as a person, choosing a
solution and growing in ability
to make choices in the future.
psychologically dependent on
the counselor, whose role as
a problem-solver tends to
limit the employees personal
growth.

Emphasis placed Psychological adjustment is Solution of current problems

paramount, with deep feelings is emphasized, with feelings
and emotional problems and emotions often ignored.
accented.

THE MANAGERS COUNSELING ROLE

Excluding reorientation, the counseling functions usually can be performed successfully by skilled
managers. They will at times perform all six counseling functions. On other occasions, if
professional counseling services are available and a problem is significant, they will, and should,
refer employees to the professional counselors. The point is that when counseling services are
established, managers must not conclude that all their counseling responsibilities have been
transferred to the counseling staff.
Managers are important counselors because they are the ones in day-to-day interactions with
employees. If managers close their eyes to the emotional problems of employees and refuse to
discuss them, they appear to be saying to employees, I dont care about you, just your work.
Managers cannot, when an emotional upset arises, say, This is not part of my job. Go to a
counselor. Emotions are part of the whole employee and must be considered a part of the total
employment situation for which a manager is responsible. For this reason all managers, from the
lowest to the highest levels, need training to help them understand problems of employees and
counsel them effectively.