I/O Psychology Chapter 10 Theories

Primary and Secondary prevention

*generally preferred because they take more active approach to removing and reducing stressors *Tertiary play useful role for stress management, less effective because they fail to address the source of stress itself

Work schedules

1) Shift work: scheduling of work according to a particular time period --> disturbance of the circadian cycle has adverse consequences for health, performance, and general satisfaction. 2) Flexible and compressed workweek schedule: flextime and compressed workweeks are on the rise as environmentally conscious employers endeavor to save energy, reduce traffic, and increase worker satisfaction

Stress reduction and management

3 major categories: 1) primary intervention 2) secondary intervention 3) tertiary intervention Table 10.3 on pg.396 is a good summarization of all of these

Locus of control

A construct that refers to whether individuals believe that what happens to them is under their control (internal) or beyond it (external) -Individuals with an internal locus of control believe that outcomes = their own personal effort and ability --Lowers strain (internals believe they can control a stressful situation to achieve their goals.) -Individuals with external locus of control = determined largely by other people, luck, fate

Buffer/moderator hypothesis

A hypothesis that social support moderates or reduces health problems by protecting individuals from the negative effects of work stressors.

General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

A nearly identical response to almost any disease or trauma (poisoning, injury, psychological stress)--Hans Selye 1) Alarm reaction: Body mobilize resources to cope with added stress (stress hormones also released --> adrenaline, noradrenaline, cortisol...etc.) 2) Resistance: body copes with the original source of stress, but resistance to other stressors is lowered. 3) Exhaustion: overall resistance drops and adverse consequences (i.e. burnout, severe illnesses... etc.) -Tracks body's response to stress over a longer period of time -In addition, it was found that cognitive appraisal of the situation and resources available to handle the stressors were also important

Stress management training

A program useful for helping employees deal with workspace stressors that are difficult to remove or change - They often include a variety of secondary prevention techniques and may even include some primary techniques. For example, many stress management programs are described as cognitive‐behavioral skills training programs.

Hardiness

A set of personality characteristics that provide resistance to stress Possess 3 characteristics: 1. They feel they are in control of their lives. 2. They feel a sense of commitment to their family and their work goals and values. 3. They see unexpected change as a challenge rather than as an obstacle. -Actively adopt problem-focused and support-seeking strategies *A key component of hardiness is transformational coping, which involves actively changing perceptions of a stressful event by viewing it as a challenge that can be overcome.

Moderator

A variable that affects the direction or strength of the association between two other variables

Fight-or-flight reaction (Cannon)

Adaptive response to stressful situations exhibited by animals and humans in which they choose to either fight or attempt to escape. -Only appropriate for sudden stress that lasts for a short time

Tend-and-befriend

Alternative fight-or-flight reaction where people respond to stress by caring for relatives and seeking and providing social support for others.

Coronary-prone personality

Alternative name given to Type A behavior pattern (TABP) because of its links to coronary heart disease and heart attacks.

Occupational Health Psychology

Area of psychology that involves the application of psychology to improving the quality of work life and to protecting and promoting the safety, health, and well‐being of workers.

Social support

Comfort, assistance, information an individual receives through formal or informal contracts with individuals or groups 1) Instrumental support: Direct help, often of a practical nature 2) emotional support: Interest in, understanding of, caring for, and sympathy with a person's difficulties 3) informational support: Information to help a person solve a problem 4) appraisal support: Feedback about a person's functioning that enhances his or her self‐esteem; -formal peer relationships can be critical in reducing stress and subsequent strains.

Primary intervention (stressor-directed)

Concerned with modifying or eliminating stressors in the work environment -Gives workers increased control over their job and environment, which directly lowers stressors and increases employee satisfaction and well-being -Job redesign or work environment, cognitive restructuring -Such changes can help workers feel that their work is more meaningful and that they have control over work outcomes. This, in turn, leads to higher motivation and satisfaction as well as lower stress at work

Employee assistance program (EAPs)

Counseling provided by an organization to deal with workplace stress, alcohol or drug difficulties, and problems stemming from outside the job. -EAPs can be very cost effective for organizations in terms of reducing absences, accidents, and health care costs. -The approach is essentially reactive and recuperative rather than proactive and preventative and focus on long-term outcomes

Autonomy

Extent to which employees can control how and when they perform the tasks of their job

Person-job fit

Extent to which the skills, abilities, and interests of an individual are compatible with demands of the job

Person-organization fit

Extent to which the values of an employee are consistent with the values held by most others in the organization -Research has found that perceptions of poor person-organization were associated with greater levels of stress, job dissatisfaction and intentions to quit one's job -Rational fit: person-job and person-organization fit -Relational fit: person-group and person-supervisor fit

Burnout

Extreme state of psychological strain resulting from prolonged response to chronic job stressors that exceed an individual's resources to cope with them. -Three components to this: 1) emotional exhaustion (individuals emotionally drained from work) 2) feelings of depersonalization (individuals who have become hardened by their job and treat clients/patients like objects) 3) feelings of low personal accomplishment (can't deal with problems effectively and can't understand or identify with problems of others) -Chronic stressors such as role ambiguity and role conflict lead to burnout *Work settings with chronic, overwhelming demands and time pressures put workers at high risk for burnout

Kahn and Byosiere stress model

Factors include: 1) Work stressors (task and role stressors) 2) Moderators of stress process (individual differences, social support) 3) Strains, consequences of stress (burnout, heart disease)

Shifts

Fixed shift: If workers are permanently assigned to a particular shift Rotated shift: Workers who are said to move from shift to shift *It appears that permanent night‐shift work provides a significant opportunity for establishing a work- life balance that is not possible with rotating shifts or, in some circumstances, day or after- noon shifts.

Cognitive-behavioral skills training

Help workers modify the appraisal processes that determine how stressful they perceive a situation to be and to develop behavioral skills for man- aging stressors. -Stress inoculation: common type of stress management training that usually combines primary and secondary prevention strategies

Person-environment fit model

Hypothesizes that the fit between a person and their environment determines the amount of stress that person perceives -A good person-environment fit occurs when a person's skills and abilities match the requirements of a job and work environment * The amount of stress a worker feels in influenced by perceptions of the demands made by the environment and by perceptions of his/her capability to deal with those demands *Also considers external influences such as social support from family and work sources *Interventions to manage stress should consider the fit between employees and both their work and family environments * Stress can influence individuals differently depending on their preferences, values, and abilities -A protective mechanism is social support

Psychological consequences of stress

Include anxiety, depression, burnout, fatigue, job tension, and dissatisfaction with one's job and life

Behavioral consequences of stress

Includes absenteeism, accidents, alcohol and drug abuse, poor job performance, and counterproductive behaviors including workplace violence. 1) Information processing: chronic stress = detrimental effects on memory, reaction times, accuracy, and performance on a variety of task. Stress leads to premature actions of stimuli, restricted use of relevant cues and increased errors on cognitive tasks 2) Job performance: relationship between stress and job performance is an inverted U (stress only increases performance up until a certain point) -Effects of stress on performance depend on the complexity of the task performed and personality charateristics of the individual performing the task 3) CBW: stressors from work environment increase perceptions of stress, which can lead to negative emotions and subsequently, counterproductive work behaviors

Individual difference characteristics as moderators of stressors

Includes locus of control, hardiness, self-esteem and Type A behavior pattern

Hindrance-related stressors

Job demands or circumstances that tend to limit or interfere with work achievement Examples: lack of job security, stalled career progression

Interpersonal conflict

Negative interactions with co-workers, supervisors, or clients, which can range from heated arguments to subtle incidents of unfriendly behavior.

Achievement striving and impatience/irritability

Other TABP subcomponents that predict work and short‐term health outcomes in Type As. -Achievement striving: Tendency to be active and to work hard in achieving one's goals (+): positively correlated with academic performance, sales performance, and job satisfaction -Impatience/irritability: Intolerance and frustration that result from being slowed down (-): The II dimension is associated with health problems such as insomnia, headaches, poor digestion, and respiratory difficulties

Compressed workweek

Permits an employee to work for longer than 8 hrs/day and fewer than 5 days/week (+): supervisors' rating of performance were higher (though productivity was not)

Stressors

Physical or psychological demands to which an individual responds -Examples of physical stressors include excessive heat, noise, and light -Examples of psychological demands include role ambiguity, interpersonal conflict, lack of control -Importance of increased stress hormones is that stressors may exist even when worker is not aware of the stressor

Self-esteem

Positive sense of self-worth - Individuals with high self‐esteem are more likely to adopt more effective coping strategies in the face of stress than individuals with low self‐esteem

Strains

Reaction or responses to stressors

Emotional labor

Regulation of one's emotions to meet job or organizational demands. -Addresses that the stress of managing emotions when jobs require that worker only display certain expression (this can be done through surface acting or deep acting) 1) surface acting: managing or faking one's expression or emotion 2) deep acting: managing one's feelings, including trying to actually change one's emotional state to match the emotions required by the job -Suppressing emotions or showing false emotions require cognitive and physiological effort, which is likely to be stressful over the long term. -To reduce the stress of emotional labor, I‐O psychologists recommend that employees use humor, obtain social support from co‐workers, and depersonalize the encounter with customers or clients.

Time urgency

Related to important work and health outcomes *Feeling of being pressured by inadequate time (concerned with saving relatively small amounts of time) -Research also indicates that certain time‐urgency dimensions (e.g., list making, scheduling) are related to work outcomes, whereas other time‐urgency dimensions (e.g., eating behavior, nervous energy, speech patterns) are related to health outcomes.

Relaxation and biofeedback techniques

Relaxation techniques: include muscle relaxation and deep-breathing exercises -Progressive muscle relaxation: Stress management technique to relax the muscles, thereby helping to progressively relax the entire body. -Biofeedback: Teaches individuals to control certain body functions (heart rate, blood pressure, etc) by responding to feedback about their body from an electronic scale

Role stressors

Role ambiguity, role conflict, and role overload = collective term for stressors resulting from multiple task requirements or roles of employees. -A job would be stressful if these roles conflict with one another or are unclear

Flextime

Schedule in which individual workers are given discretion over the time they report to work and the time they leave work on a given day. *Expected to work 40 hours a week, but free to enter and leave when they want (+): psychological advantage of perceiving some control over work schedule (+): practical advantage of achieving a better balance between work and non-work (+): associated with reduced absenteeism and increased productivity

Type A behavior pattern

Set of characteristics exhibited by individuals who are engaged in chronic struggle to obtain an unlimited number of poorly defined things from their environment in the shortest amount of time -subcomponents include hostility, achievement strivings, impatience/ irritability, and time urgency. * Core characteristic is an incessant struggle to achieve more and more in less and less time (overly obsessed with saving time) -Also appears to be associated with positive outcomes such as high work performance and career success.

Work family conflict

Situation that occurs when workers experience conflict between the roles they fulfill at work and their personal lives

Tertiary Prevention Strategies (symptom-directed)

Stress prevention strategy focused on healing the negative effects of stressors. -Examples: employee assistance programs and use of medical care, individual psychotherapy... etc.

Secondary prevention strategies (response-directed)

Stress prevention strategy that involves modifying responses to inevitable demands or stressors. -Aligned with emotion‐focused coping strategies, which seek to reduce the emotional response to the stressor and can involve avoiding, minimizing, and distancing oneself from the stressor -Examples include: lifestyle choices, skill training in negotiation and conflict resolution

Physiological consequences of stress

Stressful situations cause overactivation of the sympathetic nervous system, which produces several different kinds of stress hormones. -Physiological outcomes of stress are interrelated (one outcome can affect another to start a vicious circle/cycle), they are often categorized to into 3 types: 1) Cardiovascular outcomes of stress include changes in blood, pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol. 2) Gastrointestinal outcomes include digestive problems of various kinds. 3) Biochemical outcomes include increases in cortisol and catecholamines (stress hormones).

Role overload

Stressor that occurs when an individual is expected to fulfill too many roles at the same time.

Role ambiguity

Stressor that occurs when employees lack clear knowledge of what behaviors is expected in their job

Role conflict

Stressors that occur when demands from different sources are incompatible. -There is ample opportunity for role conflict and ambiguity because every time an entity interacts with the environment, an opportunity for confusion exists.

Circadian cycle

The 24-hr physiological cycle in which humans tend to be active during hours of light and inactive during hours of darkness.

Demand-control model (Karasek's)

Two factors prominent in producing stress: 1) job demands: defined by two criteria--workload and intellectual requirement of the job 2) job control (decision latitude) -- combination of autonomy in the job and discretion for using different skills *Combination of low control and heavy job demand correlated positively with mental strains (e.g. depression & exhaustion) and job dissatisfaction *Look at the table figure 10.3 on pg.387

Hostility

Type A behavior pattern subcomponent associated with increased secretion of stress hormones and increased risk of coronary heart disease and other long‐term, harmful health outcomes.

Problem-focused coping

Type of coping directed at managing or altering a problem causing the stress. -Examples on page 372

Emotion-focused coping

Type of coping directed at reducing emotional response to a problem by avoiding, minimizing or distancing oneself from the problem. -Examples on page 372

Cognitive restructuring

Type of stress intervention that focuses on changing perceptions and thought processes that lead to stress; reduces stress by changing the individual's perception of, or capacity to meet the demands of, the work environment.

Eustress

Type of stress that provides challenges and motivates individuals to work hard and meet their goals.

Distress

Types of stress that results from chronically demanding situations that produce negative health outcomes.

Lack of control/predictability

Varying levels of personal control and predictability have clear effects on job performance + work stress. -The individual's perception of control and predictability determines his/her response to the situation, and such perception is affected by characteristics of job and work environment. -Perception of control in the workplace also related to autonomy

Challenge-related stressors

Work demands or circumstances that, although potentially stressful, have potential gains for individuals