Examining The Paradox Of Occupational Stressors

Examining the Paradox of Occupational Stressors: Building Resilience or Creating Depletion represents insightful, intriguing, and timely research into the paradox of experienced stress in the workplace.

This volume explores and enhances our understanding of how stress and well-being at work can change over time.

Highlighting how both leader and follower stress and well-being can serve as antecedents and consequences of strategic actions and initiatives, or even be a core concern of strategic plans, this volume spotlights the importance of stress and well-being for organizations, their leaders, and the individuals who are impacted by their decisions.

This book explores avenues for organisations to better understand the origins of occupational stress so as to enable their managerial employees to effectively manage stress levels. By way of the work locus of control as a personality variable, the book identifies stressors both within and outside the organisation that underpin high stress levels in organisational culture. In grappling with what is required in the new workforce of ‘Generation Y’ millennials in a hyper-networked and mobile age, the authors present examples from everyday professional situations in South Africa to contribute to critical understanding of today’s working world. By applying neuroscientific principles developed from a foundation of empirical research, the authors introduce the concepts of a 'red zone’ and ‘blue zone' to explain differences between the brain areas controlled either by its stem-limbic areas, or the limbic-cortical cortex areas, respectively. This becomes a psychological shorthand for describing and applying knowledge to encourage practitioners in leadership and management roles to achieve desired behaviour outcomes, and to establish a framework for understanding employee values and worldviews. The book is relevant to practitioners, postgraduate students and researchers interested in industrial psychology, personality psychology, business management and human resources.

This international and thought-provoking volume addresses both theoretical and conceptual issues of resilience in modern organizations, looking at areas of concern and providing suggestions for future preventative measures. In recent years, organizations across the world have been subjected to major upheavals as several crises, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Economic Crisis, and the Migratory Crisis, have contributed to the changing landscape of work. Individuals, organizations, and societies have been forced to re-think, re-adjust, and re-align in the face of adversity. The “survivors” of such upheavals are those who come to grips with the new realities of our times and encompass resilience in its entirety. This timely collection assesses resilience on critically important variables, such as socio-economic status, occupational type, and gender differences, and highlights preventative measures that organizations and individuals should take to maximise wellbeing and adjustment in these everchanging and challenging times. Essential reading for students, scholars, practitioners, and policy makers, this volume sheds light on the multi-faceted ways to enhance the resilience paradigm and offers insights into implications for future research in the area.

Presents an examination of occupational stress, health and well being, with particular emphasis on the multi-disciplinary nature of occupational stress. This book offers a critical assessment of issues in occupational stress and well being.

This book examines stress in organizational contexts. The authors review the sources and outcomes of job-related stress, the methods used to assess levels and consequences of occupational stress, along with the strategies that might be used by individuals and organizations to confront stress and its associated problems. One chapter is devoted to examining an extreme form of occupational stress--burnout, which has been found to have severe consequences for individuals and their organizations. The book closes with a discussion of scenarios for jobs and work in the new millennium, and the potential sources of stress that these scenarios may generate.

Originally published in 1995, this book was the most up-to-date and comprehensive account of research on occupational stress at the time. It identifies the sources, consequences and treatments of stress in the workplace from the perspective of organizational psychology and makes clear recommendations for future work in this area. Terry Beehr discusses how role ambiguity and conflict act as stressors in the workplace, and discusses the characteristics of the job and the organization itself that can adversely affect performance. He examines the effects of stress in the workplace and describes methods that can be used to alleviate the problem, both at the individual and organizational level. In addition, the book is illustrated with many examples from field research over the author’s twenty years of experience in studying the workplace. This book will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in occupational psychology, as well as managers and trainers. Terry Beehr is still working in this field today.