SBenegaL

Category: Distress

  • Stress: Distress in an Organizational Context

    In the last byte, we looked at the affects of individual distress. In today’s byte, we look at the context and affects of organizational distress.

    It could be identified that if stress is mismanaged there are a lot of indirect costs that come up like – low morale, dissatisfaction, breakdown in communication, disruption in working relationships etc. We could broadly classify the costs into 3 heads:

    1. Participation Problems
    2. Performance Decrement
    3. Compensation Award
    Participation Problems are cost associated with absenteeism, tardiness, strikes and work stoppages, and turnover. Personnel Costs, Replacement Costs, are some of the overheads that an organization would require to take on in this case.

    Performance Decrement is costs resulting from poor quality or low quality of production, grievance and unscheduled machine down time and repair.

    Compensation Award is an organization cost resulting from court awards for job stress. This is an increasing trend in the US

    Thus we see that there is an increasing cost on the organization due to the various distress issues that are encountered in work place.

  • Stress: Distress Classification

    In the last byte, we understood why stress behaves the way it is indicated by the Yerkes-Dodson Law. In today’s byte, we look at some of the implications of distress on the individual front.

    As indicated in the table (in this blog), we can classify the individual distress into the following

    1. Psychological Disorder
    2. Medical Illness
    3. Behavioral Problems
    The most common types of psychological distress are depression, burnout, and psychosomatic disorders. Depression and Burnout could lead to emotional exhaustion which internal may also be caused by the requirement for emotional expression on the job. Psychosomatic disorders are physical disorders with a psychological origin.

    Numerous medical illnesses have their origin in a stress-related component. While there is no clear evidence that stress is a direct causal agent in the onset of diseases like cancer, it definitely would play an indirect role in the progression of the disease.

    Behavioral problems are the third form of individual distress. These include workplace aggression, substance abuse, accidents etc. Since we see examples of this all over the news, this need not be explained explicitly here.

    These three forms of individual distress cause a burden of personal suffering, and could also lead to a collective burden reflecting in organizational distress.

  • Stress: Consequences – Eustress & Distress

    In the last byte, we looked at personal demands that affected stress levels in individuals. In today’s byte, we look at the consequences of stress and essentially cover 2 concepts – eustress and distress.

    It is a general assumption that stress is bad – but this is not really the case always. We have talked about eustress in an earlier discussion. The when the stress begins affecting the individual, we have another term – distress. It would be good to summarize the discussion in a pictorial form.

    The above picture is adapted from the reference book.

    An organization striving for high quality products and services would need to have a healthy workforce to support the effort. Eustress is a characteristic of healthy people; and distress is not!