The document discusses strategies for managing stress in the workplace. It identifies lifestyle factors, attitude, social support, emotional regulation, time management, job redesign, and organizational factors as ways to cope with stress. Individual strategies include taking control of your time, adjusting your attitude to view challenges as opportunities, and getting support from others. Organizations can help by promoting employee well-being through health programs, training on stress management, and ensuring good job fit through selection and socialization. The key actions individuals and organizations can take to reduce stress are to take charge of what they can control, care for their own health, reach out to others for support, build competence, be creative, and maintain a positive attitude.

1. THE ORGANIZATION:
MANAGING STRESS
IN THE WORKPLACE
DR. LOURDES JOSEPHINE MARTIN

2. PART 3. COPING WITH AND MANAGING STRESS
STRATEGIES IN MANAGING AND COPING WITH STRESS
• LIFESTYLE ACQUAINTANCE
• ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
• SOCIAL SUPPORT
• EMOTIONAL REGULATION
• TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR TIME
• JOB REDESIGN
• OTHER ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS
PART 4. ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN TO COPE WITH STRESS
FOR PERSONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL
EFFECTIVENESS

3. PART 3. COPING WITH AND MANAGING STRESS
Recognizing and evaluating how stress is influencing both our own performance and that
of others is the first step in using stress constructively and avoiding its destructive aspects. As a
starting point, we need to sufficiently self-aware to know when we might be getting into the
productive and destructive ends of the stress curve.
The question, then, is how can we best use the constructive aspects of stress while
minimizing its negative physical and behavioral effects. From an organizational and personal
standpoint, managing stress has a lot in common with what we consider to be some of the basics
of good management practice – establishment of clear goals, development of resources and
support, effective communication, and self awareness.

4. PART 3. COPING WITH AND MANAGING STRESS
Individuals and organizations have at least two purposes in managing stress:
1. Preventing unnecessary and destructive levels of stress and strain so
that they are motivated and equipped to meets the challenges they
confront
2. Responding to and effectively coping with stress as it occurs

5. STRATEGIES IN MANAGING
AND CONTROLLING STRESS

6. LIFESTYLE ADJUSTMENT
Lifestyle decisions play a significant role in influencing
our physical health and well being as well as our ability to cope
successfully with the demands, challenges and stresses of our
work

7. LIFESTYLE ADJUSTMENT
To be effective workers and leaders, we need to be
healthy enough to cope with the demands and challenges we
face and to deal with the physical manifestations of stress when
we experience them.

8. LIFESTYLE ADJUSTMENT
It is worth reminding ourselves in this context that it is
important to eat a balanced diet, get enough sleep and exercise
regularly. Following these tried-and-true prescriptions for a
healthy life helps to prevent some of the negative
manifestations of stress and to cope with stress related
symptoms.

9. LIFESTYLE ADJUSTMENT
In considering lifestyle questions, it is constructive to
evaluate and make appropriate changes to maintain a balance
between work and outside interests. Those whose whole lives
revolve around work and work-related issues seem to
experience more stress. In this way, leisure and recreational
time not only is important to quality of life but also may
contribute to enhanced work performance. By having outside
interests and activities, we are better able to keep our
perspective and cope with the demands of our careers.

10. ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
In a survey of human resources managers in 400 public and
private organizations, 94% of the respondents said that “healthy attitudes”
helped people to increase their tolerance for stress.
Individuals may respond to the same demands in very different
ways. Part of this difference lies in the fact that some people might
interpret a particular situation as threatening, whereas others might see
the same situation as an opportunity. Our cognitive appraisal of a
situation, then, influences whether or not we will experience it stressful
(Lazarus, DeLongis, Folkman, & Gruen, 1985)

11. ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
Remember that, depending on how we handle it, stress can be
good for us and make us better able to handle future challenges. In fact,
developing psychological resilience only occurs through having problems,
challenges and failures.
In psychology, the term resilience was first used to describe the
qualities possessed by certain children, who despite a number of serious
risk factors that would have otherwise predicted significant problems,
instead thrived and prospered.

12. ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
Studies of how to foster resilience in children emphasize the
importance of three characteristics:
1. Social competence
2. Problem solving skills
3. Development of a critical consciousness
(Bernard, 1995)
Similarly, Wolin and Wolin (1993) described resilience in children
and adolescents as involving insight, independence, relationships,
initiative, humor, creativity, and morality.

13. ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
Resilience has also been used to describe the characteristics of
certain adults in work settings.
Coutu (2002) suggested several strategies for developing
resilience:
1. Facing the realities of a particular situation or problem. Realistic
optimism better than misguided optimism.
2. Having a strong value system that helps us set priorities and
make sense of the challenges we face enhances resilience
3. Ingenuity fosters resilience by improvising and being creative with
the resources that are available to us.
At the core, resilient people “turn challenges into opportunities”
(Harland, Harrison, Jones, & Reiter-Palmon, 2005)

14. ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT
As with many areas of organizational behavior and leadership,
self-knowledge is critical. Knowing our strengths and weaknesses, and
evaluating our ambitions in light of them, helps to keep us focused on
realistic goals. An acceptance of the fact that none of us can be perfect
can go a long way toward avoiding unnecessary levels of stress
associated with unrealistic self-expectations.
If, on the other hand, you find on reflection that you try to avoid
having high expectations for yourself, avoid all risks, or find yourself bored
and dissatisfied at work, then you might want to find ways of increasing
the demands and stresses of your job.

15. SOCIAL SUPPORT
People are social beings. From a medical standpoint, in fact,
social isolation is a major risk factor in human morbidity and mortality.
One of the key mediating factors in determining how well people
cope with stress is the amount and quality of social support that they
receive.
Relationships with our supervisors, our employees, or our co-
workers can provide structural, functional, emotional, and tangible
support, thereby enabling us to ameliorate the potentially harmful effects
of stress in the workplace (Beehr, 1995)

16. Structural support comes from being embedded in and connected
to a network of people whom we know can potentially provide support.
Social support also can be advantageous in that it may serve a
particular function in our lives, such as self-esteem, companionship,
information, or even humor that enables us to better cope with the
demands of our work
Emotional support can take the form of understanding and
sympathetic listening, which in turn can reduce anxiety
Tangible support, might take the form of helping with a task or
providing resources or assistance to someone at a stressful time
SOCIAL SUPPORT

17. The importance of structural, emotional, and functional social
support has implications for both what we can do for ourselves as
individuals and what we can do to help others in our organization.
SOCIAL SUPPORT
Listening sympathetically to others, offering assistance, and
reminding others of their contributions and strengths helps them to
become more resilient when faced with organizational stressors at the
same time as it benefits us by strengthening our connections to them.

18. EMOTIONAL REGULATION
All of us regulate our emotions to a greater or lesser extent under different
kinds of circumstances. Particularly at work, we may choose to conceal or alter the
external display of our emotions for our own reasons or because the employer has set
up certain rules for behavior.
“Emotion regulation” is a term generally used to describe a person’s ability to
effectively manage and respond to an emotional experience. People unconsciously use
emotion regulation strategies to cope with difficult situations many times throughout
each day. Most of us use a variety of emotion regulation strategies and are able to
apply them to different situations in order to adapt to the demands of our environment.
Some of these are healthy, some are not. Healthy coping strategies, such as managing
stress with a walking program, do not cause harm. They can help to diffuse strong
emotions, often allowing for a greater understanding of what led to the emotional
experience

19. TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR TIME
Time pressures coupled with too much to do are a major source
of stress.
Effective time management involves establishing and
reaffirming priorities, taking stock of how you spend your time, and then
organizing your time to better reflect your goals, plans and
commitments.
Time management for some individuals might include detailed
scheduling, but for many others

20. TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR TIME
Effective time management gives us a sense of control over our
days. It is not just a matter of completing all of the tasks presented to
us. In fact, at the end of the day, after we have done everything that
everyone has asked and that we are expected to do, we still might
experience stress if we have not made time to do things that we judge
to be the most important.
Determine what your priorities are.
Plan your time accordingly.

21. TAKING CONTROL OF YOUR TIME
In planning your time, it also is very important to allocate some
part of the day for reflection, rest, creativity, and social contact. Although
it might not be possible to “do it all” everyday, it is possible to do the
things that are most important. Doing so increases your feelings of
accomplishment and control and, as a result, reduces stress while
increasing your effectiveness.

22. JOB REDESIGN
Some stress arises from the nature of work itself. Modifying and
redesigning jobs can ameliorate some sources of work related stress.
Jobs that have skill variety, task identity, and task significance
are intrinsically more motivating. Such jobs increase satisfaction, give a
sense of meaning to our work, and reduce stress (Quick et al., 1997)
Jobs with great responsibility and little autonomy can cause
high levels of stress. Job redesign and enrichment – including efforts to
increase control and autonomy, participation in decision making, and
feedback on outcomes – can help to reduce the stress associated with
these jobs.

23. JOB REDESIGN
Quick and colleagues (1997) stated, “Increasing
participationand autonomy leads to greater freedom of action, still within
defined limits, which enables individuals to channel and release stress
induced energy more naturally”.
A study by Bunce and West (1996) demonstrated that, in the
long term, providing opportunities for employees to develop innovative
responses to work stressors by changing work methods and modifying
working relationships was more effective than traditional stress
management interventions.

24. JOB REDESIGN
Ironically, sometimes asking for more responsibility for the
“whole job” actually can reduce stress. Although there are some
constraints on the expansion of job responsibilities and on the nature of
tasks to be performed in public sector jobs, sometimes even modest
changes can help a great deal

25. OTHER ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS
West and West concluded based on their study of job stress,
organizations must be attentive to preventive strategies in recruiting,
selecting and socializing employees. They suggested that because
stress is, in part, a consequence of the “fit” between people and their
organizational environment, recruitment and selection should be seen
as an opportunity to ensure better person – organization matches.
Health promotion programs can encourage employees to
engage in behaviors promoting healthy lifestyle, and employee
assistance programs (EAPs) can provide assistance or refer
employees to outside resources when troubles arise.

26. OTHER ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS
Wright and Cropanzano (2004) argued that worker’s
performance can be positively influenced by promoting their
psychological well-being and happiness. Their research suggested that
happier workers cope with stress more efficiently than their unhappy
counterparts, and as a result they are more productive. They also
suggested training programs that will help employees to cope with
stress in a positive way emphasizing the importance of happiness.

27. OTHER ORGANIZATIONAL FACTORS
Management practices that make people feel valued, that
provide clear goals, that communicate well, and that offer opportunities
for workers to participate and grow reduce feelings of anxiety,
uncertainty, and role conflict; increase feelings of control and
responsibility; and increase the likelihood that employees will feel
equipped and confident that they can meet the challenges they confront

28. PART 4. ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN TO COPE WITH STRESS
FOR PERSONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
1. TAKE CHARGE
Identify the major stresses in your life and evaluate which you
can control or influence and which you cannot
2. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF
Keeping yourself healthy makes you more resilient in tha face
of stress and stress-related health problems.
3. REACH OUT TO OTHERS
Time with friends at work or outside of work will help you cope
with stress and keep you mentally healthy

29. PART 4. ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN TO COPE WITH STRESS
FOR PERSONAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
6. BUILD YOUR COMPETENCE
Build your competence and confidence by enhancing your
skills, abilities and knowledge
7. GET CREATIVE
Find ways of innovating on the job
8. ADJUST YOU ATTITUDE
Remember that although stress is not “all in your head”, how
you perceive situations affects how stressed you become. Pay
particular attention to your self-talk