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2. What Stress Is??
• Strees is the general term applied to the pressures people feel in life.
• The presence of stress at work is almost inevitable in many jobs.
• However, individual differences account for a wide range of reaction to
stress;
• When it becomes excessive, employees develop various symptoms of stress
that can harm their job performance and health;
• Physiological: Ulcers, Digestive problems, Headaches, High blood pressure,
Sleep disruption.
• Psychological: Emotional instability, Moodiness, Nervousness and tension,
Chronic worry, Depression, Burnout.
• • Behavioral: Excessive smoking, Abuse of alcohol or drugs, Absenteeism,
Aggression, Safety problems, Performance problems.

4. Extreme Products of Stress .
• Stress can be either temporary or long-term, either mild or severe. If stress
is temporary and mild, most people can handle it or at least recover from is
effects rather quickly.
• Burnout: The human body can’t instantly rebuilt its ability to cope with
stress once it’s depleted. People become physically and psychologically
weakened from trying to combat it. This conditon is called burnout.

5. Extreme Products of Stress
• Trauma: Another severe product of stress is trauma, occurs following
a major threat to one’s security. The event could be a natural disaster,
an organizational crisis, dramatic employee abuse by the employer, or
personal job loss. One problematics order is called workplace trauma.
• Attitudinal clues to workplace trauma include severe moodiness,
concentration difficulties, and alienation, in addition to the more
distinctive behaviors of tardiness, absenteeism, and accident-
proneness

6. • A common source of workplace trauma is sudden job loss, with
• its potentially crushing effect on one’s self-esteem. The individual
impact was often magnified by two factors –the lack of warning and
the lack of insularity felt by even high-performing employees.
• Some experience layoff survivor’s sickness, with feelings of
uncertainty, anger, guilt, and distrust. They are simultaneously glad to
have a job and guilty that their workmates were displaced. In the
meantime the job pressures on them often increase dramatically as
they try to shoulder the tasks of former colleagues. They also wonder,
“Will i be the next to be cut?”

7. • Another source of trauma is to witness workplace violence.
• Sometimes a trouble employee takes dramatic and harmful physical
action against coworkers, managers or company property. These
violent, anger-based acts can include unprovoked fights, destruction
of property or use of weapons to harm others.
• Any person who witness violence, receiver injury from it or lives
under the fear of repeated future violence may suffer from post-
traumatic stress disorder. The shock of sudden and dramatic violent
incidents often produces immidiate stress-related syptoms. More
significantly, the effects of these traumatic crises may last for years
and require lengthy treatment.

8. Causes of Stress
• An important first step in prevention is to examine and understand
the causes of stress. Conditions that tend to cause stress are called
stressors. Although even a single stressor may cause major stress,
usually stressors combine to pressure an employee in a variety of
ways until stress develops. The major source of employee stress are
evenly divided between organizational factors and the nonwork
environment. To control stress, then, organizations, usually begin by
exploring its job-related causes.

9. Job-Related Causes of Stress
• Almost any job condition can cause stress, depending on an
employee’s reaction to it. For example, one 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 employee’s experiences, general outlooks and
expectations, which are all internal factors. 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 are an automatic supervisor , an insecure job climent,
lack of control over one’s own job and inadequate authority to match
one’s responsibilities.

10. • -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-Change of any type,especially when it
is major or unusually -Frustration-Tecnology with training or support

11. • Role conflict and ambiguity are also related to stress. In situation of this
type, people have different expectations of an employee’s activities on a
job, so the employee does not know what to do and can’t 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 practices.
Substantial differences can lead to significant mental stress as an effort is
made to balance the requirements of both sets of values.Some jobs
produse more stress than others. Those which involve rotating shift work,
machine-paced tasks, routine and repetitive work or hazardous
environments are assosiated with greater stress. Workers who spend many
hours daily in front of computer screens also report high stress levels.
Evidence also indicates that the sources of stress differ by organizational
level.

12. • Middle managers may experience stress when their job security is
threatened by news of impending corporate downsizings. Workers are
more likely to experience the stressors of low status, lack of preceived
control, resource shortages and the demand for a large volume of
error-free work.A related source of stress that affect many employees
is worry over their financial well-begin. This situation can arise when
cost-saving technology is introduced, contract negotiations begin or
the firm’s financial performance suffers. Clearly, there are numerous
and powerful force at work that can contribute to the feeling of
stress.

13. Frustration
• Another cause of stress is Frustration. It is a result of a motivation
begin blocked to prevent one from reaching a desired goal. These
reaction to frustration are known as defense mechanisms, because
you are trying to defend yourself from the psychological effects of the
blocked goal.
• The situation is more serious when there is a long-run frustration
such as blocked opportunity for promotion. Then you have to live with
the frustration day after day. It begins to build emotional disorders that
interfere with your ability to function effectively.

14. Stress and Job Performance
• • Stress can be either helpful or harmful to job performance, depending on
its level. When there is no stress, job challenges are absent, and
performance tends to be low. As stress increases, performance tends to
increase, because stress helps a person call up recources to meet job
requirements. Constructive stress is a healthy stimulus that encourages
employees to respond to challenges. Eventually, stress reaches a plateau
that corresponds approximately with a person’s top day-to-day
performance capability. At this point additional stress tends to produce no
more improvement. • Finally, if stress becomes too great, it turns into a
destructive force. Performance begin to decline at some point because
excess stress interferes with performance. An employee loses the ability to
cope; she or he becomes unable to make decisions and exhibits erratic
behavior. If stress increases to a breaking point, performance becomes
zero; the employee has breakdown, becomes too ill to work, is fired, quits
or refuses to come to work to face the stress.

16. Stress Vulnerability
• Stress Threshold Perceived Control •
• Worker vulnerability to stress is a function of both internal and external
stressors. One internal factor is an employee’s stress threshold. Some
people have a low threshold and the stress of even relatively small changes
or disruptions in their work routines causes a reduction in performance.
Others have a high threshold staying cool, calm and productive longer
under the same conditions.
• • The second internal factor affecting employee stress is the amount of
perceived control they have over their work and working conditions.
Empoyees who have a substantial degree of independence, autonomy and
freedom to make decisions seem to handle work pressures better.

17. • Type A and Type B People Type A People Type B People
• • They are aggressive and competitive, set high standards are
impatient with themselves and others and thrive under constant time
pressures.
• • They appear more relaxed and easygoing. They accept situations
and work with them rather than fight them competitively. Type B
people are especially relaxed regarding time pressures, so they are
less prone to have problems associated with stress.

18. Approaches to Stress Management
• • Both organizations and individuals are highly concerned about
stress and its effects. In attempting to manage stress, they have three
broad options –prevent or control it, escape from it or learn to adapt
to it (handle its symptoms).
• • These steps are aimed at reducing or eliminating stressors for
employees. Some employees can escape stress by requesting job
transfers, finding alternative employment, taking early retirement or
acquiring assertiveness skill that allow them to confront the stressor.

19. • Social Support
• • Some people experience stress because they are detached from the
world around them; they lack warm interpersonal relationships.
Individuals with driving ambition and strong need for independence
may fail to develop close attachments to friends and collegues. To
achieve their lack of social attachments may result in anger, anxiety
and loneliness –all producing stress in their lives. • 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,
informational, evaluative and emotional.

20. • • 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 reduce
their symptoms of stress. The ideal ingredients of this relaxation
effort involve -A comfortable position in a relatively guilt 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

21. • Biofeedback Sabbaticals • A different approach for working with
stress is biofeedback, by which people under medical guidance learn
from instrument feedback to influence symptoms of stress, such as
increased heart rate or severe headaches. • Whereas relaxation and
biofeedback are methods for coping with stress, sometimes it is
wisest to at least temporarily remove yourself from it. Some
employers, recognizing this need for employees to escape, have
created programs allowing sabbatical leaves to encourage stress relief
and personal education. Some sabbaticals provide unpaid time off,
others give partially paid leaves, and a few continue full pay while
employees are away. Most employees return emotional refreshed,
feel rewarded and valued by their employees.

22. • Personal Wellness • In general, here is a trend toward in-house
programs of preventive maintenance for personal wellness that are
based on research in behavioral medicine. 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. Clearly a preventive
approach is preferable for reducing the cause of stress, although
coping methods can help employees adapt to stressors that are
beyond direct control.

23. Employee Counseling •
• What Counseling is?
• • 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 and well-being. Good
mental health means that people 1-Feel comfortable about themselves, 2-
Right about other people, 3-Able to meet
• Counseling may be performed by both professionals
and nonprofessionals.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
employee’s performance on the job.

24. Need for Counseling
• • The need for counseling arises from a varienty of employee problems,
including stress. When these problems exist, employees benefit from the
understanding and guidance that counseling can provide. • Most problems
that require counseling have some emotional content. Emotions are a
normal part of life. Nature gave people their emotions and these feeling
make people human. One the other hand, emotions can get out of control
and cause workers to do things that are harmful to their own best interests
and those of the firm. They may leave their jobs because of triflinf conflicts
that seem large to them or they may undermine morale in their
departments. Managers want their employees to maintain good mental
health and to channel their emotional along constraction lines so that they
will work together effectively.

25. What Counseling Can Do
• ?The general objectives of counseling are to help employees grow in
self-confidence, understanding, self-control and ability to work
effectivey.The counseling objective is achieved through one or more
of the following counseling functions. The six activities performed by
counseling.

26. • 1-Advice:
• 2-Reassurance Many people view counseling as primarily an advise-
giving activity but in reality this is only one of several functions that
counseling can perform. The giving of advise requires a counselor to
make judgments about a counselee’s problems and to lay out a
course of action. 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 ae pursuing a suitable course of action. One
trouble with reassurance is that the counselees do not always accept
it. They are smart enough to know that the counselor can’t know that
the problem will come out all right.

27. • 3-Communication 4-Release of Emotional Tension Counseling can
improve both upward and downward communication. In an upward
direction, it is a key for employees to express their feeling to
management. Counseling also achieves downward communication
because counselors help interpret company activities to employees as
they discuss problems related to them. 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 They
are more relaxed and their speech is more coherent and rational.

28. • 5-Clarified Thinking 6-Reorientation • The case of Irwin also illustrates
another function of counseling, that of clarified thinking. • Clarified
thinking tends to be a normal result of emotional release but a skilled
counselor can aid this prosess. In order to clarify he counselee what is
right. 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. • Another function of counseling is reorientation of the
counselee. This is more than mere emotional release or clear thinking
about problem. Reorientation involves a change in the employee’s psychic
self through a change in basic goals and values. • The manager’s job is to
recognize those in need of reorientation before their need becomes severe
so that they can be referred to proffissional help in time for successful
treatment.

29. Types of Counseling
• Directive Counseling Nondirective Counseling Directive counseling is the
process of listening to an employee’s 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 and
clarify thinking. Nondirective (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. Managers can be use the nondirective approach;however , care
should be taken to make sure that managers aren’t so oversold on it that
they neglect their normal directive leadership responsibilities.

30. Types of Counseling

31. A Contingency View
•
• Nondirective counseling of employees is limited because it requires
professional counselors and is costly. Directive counseling often isn’t
accepted by modern, independent employees. •
•
Participative (cooperative) counseling is a mutual counselor-counselee
relationship that establishes a cooperative exchange of ideas to help solve
a counselee’s problems.
•
• A manager’s decision to use either directive, participative or nondirective
counseling with an employee should be based on an analysis of several
contingency factors. It should not be made solely on the manager’s
personal preference or past experience.
•
• However, the manager’s knowledge and capacity to use a variety of
methods are clearly critical factors in choosing hoe to proceed.
•

32. • Use By Professionals • Professional counselors usually practice some form
of nondirective counseling and often accomplish four of the six counseling
functions. Communication occurs both upward and downward through the
counselor.
• Emotional release takes place even more effectively than with directive
counseling and clarified thinking tends to follow. The unique advantage of
nondirective counseling is its ability to couse the employee’s reorientation.
• • Profissional counselors treat each counselee as a social and
organizational equal. They primarily listen in a caring and supportive
fashion and try to help the counselee discover and follow improved courses
of action.

33. • Participative Counseling Nondirective counseling of employees is limited
because it requires professional counselors and is costly. Directive counseling
often isn’t accepted by modern, independent employees.
• Participative (cooperative) counseling is a mutual counselor-counselee
relationship that establishes a cooperative exchange of ideas to help solve a
counselee’s problems.
• A manager’s decision to use either directive, participative or nondirective
counseling with an employee should be based on an analysis of several
contingency factors. It should not be made solely on the manager’s personal
preference or past experience.
• However, the manager’s knowledge and capacity to use a variety of
methods are clearly critical factors in choosing hoe to proceed.
•