Individuals too can focus on a lot of interventions to help prevent distress and enhance a sense of well-being. We would again for the sake of convenience classify the preventions into primary, secondary or tertiary nature. We would begin discussion about each in a brief detail from the next byte, but the following diagram summarizes the benefits.
Social support systems are crucial for an individual. Team building is one such means to get the supportive social relationship in the workplace; however this limits many a time to the organizational context alone. As individuals, it is essential to receive the socio-emotional support from personal relationships beyond the work place and this is important for psychological well being of an individual.
The following diagram is adapted from the reference book to help map out the various social support systems an individual possesses.
Understanding this, could help improve the work environment in a number of ways. Interpersonal communication is definitely a key to unlocking the social support that one looks towards a preventive stress management mechanism.
The plethora of relationships highlighted in the network provide emotional caring, information, feedback, modeling and other support that help the individual effectively structure his/her work to be less stressful.
Preventive Stress Management in organizations is also attempted through goal-setting activities. These activities increase task motivation, while reducing the degree of role conflict and ambiguity to which people face. We have already discussed goal setting in an earlier byte and wouldn’t dwell in detail on that. Simply put, goal setting focuses a person’s attention and helps direct the energy for productive purposes.
Role Negotiation is an interesting organizational development technique since it allows the employees to modify their work roles. It would be interesting to discuss this process in a bit more detail here.
Role Negotiation begins by defining a specific role – “focal role” within the organizational context. The person in the focal role then identifies the expectations understood for that role and there are organizational members who specify their expectations from the focal role. The Negotiation is between the incumbents’ expectation and the key members’ expectations. This clears off the points of confusion and conflict also provides opportunities for clarifications and resolutions. The end product expected is a clear, well-defined focal role with which the person and organizational members are comfortable.
The model presented above indicates that a combination of high job demands and restricted job decision latitude or worker control leads to a situation of high strain. Invariably job redesign should attempt to enhance worker control. This reduces distress and strain without necessarily reducing productivity in many scenarios.
Reduction in job stress by increasing worker control in job redesign is one means of achieving preventive stress, there are other means as well; say job decision latitude being increased. This could be done through greater decision authority in sequencing of work activities, the timing of work schedules, selection and sequencing of work tools, or even selection of the work team.
It is important to note, that job redesign should also work at reducing uncertainty and increasing predictability in the work one performs.
Some organizations have a low-stress and healthy environment while others have a high stress environment with influence on the health of employees. Research has indicated that the perception of organizational fairness and justice helps reduce stress in organizations.
A comprehensive approach to ensure preventive stress management should address all three levels: primary, secondary and tertiary. Most organizational prevention at the primary level is in the form of job redesign, goal setting, role negotiation, and career management. The secondary level includes team building and social support at work. Handling the third level requires a special means and some companies have put up dedicated programs like – violence prevention programs, etc to address these.
Over the next few bytes, we shall discuss about Job Redesign, Goal Setting, Role Negotiation and Social Support systems as part of understanding the primary level preventive stress management techniques.
To better understand the context, lets us diagrammatically represent the same. This is an adopted version from our reference book on organizational behavior.
The secondary approach to prevention of stress is more based on the way individual or organization responds to the demand or stressor. People in this case would need to learn to manage the inevitable, inalterable work stressors and demands so as to avert distress and strain while promoting healthy habits.
In the Tertiary approach, they symptoms that emerge out of the stressful situation in the form of symptoms of ill health – could be headaches or even behavioral like absenteeism or in extreme cases hypertension, work stoppages and strikes. There are mechanisms like a full time counselor etc which could help address some of these sorts of issues.
Stress as we know is all prevalent – it doesn’t just feature at work but also in personal life. Though typically confused with distress, stress itself is neither inherently bad nor destructive. It is something that can be managed and Preventive Stress Management (PSM) is one of the ways we can do that in an organization. Preventive Stress Management is an organizational philosophy that holds that people and organizations should take joint responsibility for promoting health and preventing distress and strain. There are essentially three stages of prevention – they are: