Stress

Submitted By: Gyanbitt Kar U113086 PGDM 2013-15 Section-B

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Stress can be defined as a state of mental or emotional strain or suspense. There are many adverse effects of prolonged stress on the body. Stress can be perceived as a force of nature-be it the forces from the internal or external environment affecting the individual. The individual retaliates back to the environment and other individuals in ways that often show that that individual is in stress. We usually perceive stress as a negative experience owing to the overabundance of stress in your daily lives, but stress can actually be a neutral, negative, or positive experience from the biological point of view. In general, both the internal and external factors account for the stress in our lives. External factors comprise of the physical environment, including your home, your relationships with others, your job, and all the challenges, situations, hardships, and expectations that we confront on a daily basis. Internal factors are the ones that determine our body's ability to deal and respond to the external stress-inducing factors. Internal factors which influence our ability to handle stress include our overall fitness and health levels, nutritional status emotional balance, and the amount of sleep and rest that we get. Many evolutionary changes are a consequence of stress (natural selection and the development of species over ages). Therefore, species that adapted the best to the causes of stress (stressors) have survived and evolved into the plant and animal kingdoms we now observe. Those who could sustain the stress could live and be a part of the plant and animal kingdom that we see today. A person can be said to be in stress when he/she feels that the environmental demands exceed his/her adaptive capacity. Operationally, the studies of psychological stress either focus on the occurrence of several environmental events which are concordantly judged as taxing ones ability to cope or on the basis of individual responses to events which are indicate this overload, such as the perceived stress and eventevoked negative affect. However, various factors like the psychiatric disorders that may arise as subsequent consequences of stressful exposure and the tendencies often linked to stress, such as Type-A behavior and hostility have been excluded from the definition of stress. Psychological Stress and Diseases In general, it is thought that the pathologic processes of a physical disease are influenced by the stressful events by causing negative affective states (e.g. feelings of depression and anxiety), which in turn wield a direct effect on the various behavioral patterns or biological processes that influence the risk of getting affected by a disease. Exposures to chronic stress are considered the most toxic because they are most likely to result in long-term or permanent changes in the physiological, behavioral, and emotional reactions that determine the course of and susceptibility to disease. This includes several stressful events that prevails over an extended duration (for example caring for a dementia affected spouse) or a brief central event that continues to be experienced for a long time after they have occurred (such as experiencing a sexual assault). Behavioral changes occurring as coping responses or adaptations to various factors of stress (called stressors) such as decreased sleep and exercise, hapless adherence to medical therapy and increased frequency of smoking provide a significant pathway through which disease risk is influenced by stressors. Another key pathway is provided by the stressor-provoked endocrine response. There are two endocrine response systems that are particularly responsive to the psychological stress: first being the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical) axis and second, the SAM (Sympathetic-Adrenal-Medullary) system. Cortical, the primary accomplice of the HPA activation in humans influences a wide range of physiological processes, including the metabolism of fats, proteins and carbohydrates; anti-inflammatory responses; and Gluconeogenesis. Likewise, Catecholamines, which are released in reaction to the SAM activation, work with the autonomic nervous system to exercise the regulative effects on the various systems like the pulmonary, hepatic, muscular, immune and skeletal systems. Prolonged activation of the 2

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SAM and HPA systems can affect their control of other physiological systems, which would in turn result in an increased risk for psychiatric and physical disorders. Pathways linking Stress and Depression Stressful events have been associated with various major depressive symptoms and psychological disorders. Studies show that approximately 20%-25% of individuals who have experienced any major stressful events are susceptible to develop depression. During the 3-6 months before onset of depression, 50% to 80% of depressed people go through a major life event, compared with only 20% to 30% of nondepressed individuals who have been studied during the same period of time. Although most of the investigations have focused on their life events as actuators of the onset of depression, increased amount of stress also bodes the clinical course of depression, including various attributes such as symptom exacerbation, relapse and longer duration. Evidences also show that the events that occur coincidentally with the treatment reduce a positive response from the body system. Occupational Stress: its impact on employees Occupational stress is considered to be a major health issue for work organizations today. It has been found that the various conditions prevailing in the workplace have been leading to negative emotional responses (such as anxiety), physical health ailments in both the long term cardiovascular disease (cardiovascular disease) and the short term (e.g. stomach distress or headache), and counter-productive conduct at work. An important role in the process is played by the perceptions of control play, as it is associated with all of the dependent variables. Proof says that heightened control at work could prove to be an important element in an employees well being and health. The control-stress model is used to understand these relationships well. Occupational Stress has been identified as one of the most dominant health hazards associated with the workplace for the employees in the developed countries including the U.S. It has been pointed out by Cartwright and Cooper (1997) that short-term stress can result in stomach disorder, emotional distress, sleeplessness, headaches, and loss of energy, and can contribute to serious illness and in worse cases, premature death due to cardiovascular ailments as its long term effects. They substantiated the claim and further said that occupational stress costs the American businesses over $150 billion per year because of lost productivity, absenteeism and health costs. Furthermore, it seems to be endemic to modern workplace, as various national surveys have shown that a large portion of workers have reported feeling stressed at work. Social Stress: Its Implications and Control There are basically two hypotheses in issues pertaining to Social Stress i.e. social stress is an important determinant of mental health status and that sex, age, marital status, and social class affect mental health and well-being partly because of social status differences in exposure to stress. The stress hypothesis has not been effectively tested as wholly fair measurement of stress exposure remains to be achieved. For the same reason it has been suggested that the importance of stress itself for explaining the epidemiology of mental health has been prematurely forbade by researchers in the favor of focusing on the differences in the social status in the vulnerability to stress. The main purpose is not to falsify or even to challenge the vulnerability hypothesis. Rather, it has been simply proposed that social stress might be considerably more crucial as a determinant of mental well being than currently assumed and that the function of stress in explicating the variations in the mental health by age, marital status, socio-economic status, and sex remains to be demonstrated. A more 3

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intensive effort to figure out the exposure to stress than has been typical, and it has been argued that conclusions indicating that the social dispersion of stress complements distributions for the various depressive symptoms and the major depressive disorder would provide a preliminary support for the hypothesis of stress exposure. Based on the concept of "operant burden," which is believed to be the best available estimate of the recent and current stressful events, it has been found that patterns of stress distributions matched very closely with those people who were observed for depression across age, sex, occupation, and marital status. These findings are in coherence with the hypothesis that differences in mental health originate, at least in part, from systematic contrasts in the quantity or the nature of stress that is experienced by the individuals who are differentially situated in the society. The valuation of the magnitude of the shares of stress to these distributions showed significant effects of stress on the deviations in mental health by the occupational status, major effects pertaining to the status of risk of the previously married, and at least a notable share to the relationship of gender with the mental health. The Stress of Higher Status We focus on the interference between roles in the workplace and home as it is a chief stressor that can disrupt the well-being of an individual. Home-to-work conflict involves the limit to which people feel that work life intervenes with the expectations and tasks of the home. As per the role-strain theory, the obligations and demands conferred within the multiple roles usually vie for an individual's limited energy and time. The conflict between home and work domains involves intruding responsibilities and cognitive disturbances in the role of work that makes it hard for a person to perform the activities being in a nonwork role. The stress model identifies home-to-work conflict as an inveterate stressor owing to its repetitive, enduring nature and its connection to the major roles one needs to assume in an institution. Despite both directions of conflict i.e. home-to-work and work-to-home being influential stressors, there is a lot of attention paid on the direction of work-to-home for various reasons. Also, adding to the fact that work-to-home conflict is very common, the various systems of classification of individuals into classes associated with work will probably generate a shift from the work sphere into the home domain. It has also been affirmed that the various work-related conditions "generally portend work-to-family conflict in contrast with family-to-work conflict". In contrast, the bulk of research on the predictors of family-towork conflict show that the quality, structure, and organization of social relationships in the family, especially in parental and marital roles affect the exposure to conflicts that flow from the domain family into the work domain. These views are also valid for the stress process model, which suggests that the conditions within a role that are likely to influence the stressors that arise there and eventually spill over to the other role domains. The stress of the hypothesis of the higher status predicts that work conditions and higher-status occupations increase the vulnerability to work-to-home conflict. Our theoretical principle for that prediction is derived partly from the depiction of work as a "greedy institution" that demands a lot of energy and effort from its workers, especially those in higher-status positions. Despite observations made beforehand, that managerial workers are more susceptible to feel as if they are in a "time squeeze", or "overworked", very little is known about the levels of work-tohome conflict across a wide range of occupations. Although some have shown higher levels of work-tohome conflict among managerial workers, many surveys of the work-to-home conflict predictors omit factors like the occupational status, compare two very different categories of high- and low-status groups, or focus solely on the well-educated or the professionals. While the material and psychosocial conditions associated with professional occupations are usually beneficial, the stress of higher status hypothesis also identifies their potential costs. Specifically, workers in the managerial jobs work longer hours and are inclined towards more job demands.

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Influence of Stress on the Team Effectiveness There have been studies that have differentiated between quantitative and qualitative stress, and while duplicating the usual inference that quantitative stress adversely affects the team effectiveness, it also proved that qualitative stress can increase the team effectiveness. In addition, the end results of the current study provide an important proof testifying that structure actually matters. Nonetheless, there seems to be no unique answer to the question of methods to structure the teams working under stress. As the findings show, the organizations must endorse standardized routines to check the negative effects of quantitative stress on the team effectiveness and commitment, and emphasize on the practices that promote autonomy and a systems view to increase the positive effects of qualitative stress on team effectiveness. Given the fact that qualitative stress increases the team effectiveness, employers should consider designing broader and more complex tasks for the cross-functional teams. Such tasks may be an emolument for team members to stay motivated to work in team, whereas boring and simple tasks strengthen the feeling that teamwork is superfluous. Secondly, the cross-functional teams should be able to make meaningful decisions on the structuring of the teams depending on their work circumstances, (i.e. in case it is described more by qualitative or by quantitative stress) rather than by allowing these structures to strive automatically for a certain mode of structure or allowing them to emerge. Thirdly, there are two factors limit the advantages of the latter solution: most of the teams face periods of both qualitative and quantitative stress; and most of the teams experience hardships in molding their structure as a reaction to the changing environments. Results show that combining the features of mechanistic and organic structuring, and developing a versatile and elaborate repertory of modes of structuring, alike in an endeavor to get the best of the structuring process for developing team effectiveness, is not just enough. To succeed in the efforts, managers need to put in external supports to smoothen the path of this 'both/and' approach. These may include training programs aiming at enhancing the team efforts under stress, goal-oriented feedback systems that precisely manage and monitor reward or teamwork systems (team-based bonuses) that bring out the value of collaborative behaviour. Employers should remain prepared to experiment with the substitute ways of designing teams, depending on the input of their various stakeholders for the feedback on both failures and successes. Empiric intercession investigation should try to determine if they have to choose between flexible jobs or structured procedures, or whether it is possible to combine the characteristics from the two structuring modes to get a system that optimizes and serves working under both quantitative and qualitative stress. Stress, Smoking Intensity and Smoking Status In a very interesting study that was conducted in 2005 by a group of scientists, the relationship between work stress, smoking intensity and smoking status was established. The study was carried out across 21 hospitals and ten municipalities in Finland. Binary logistic regression models for the prevalence of smoking were associated with the survey responses of 37309 female and 8881 male Finnish employees working in public sector companies in the 17-65 age group. Various multinomial logistic regression models were calculated for smoking intensity and 8130 smokers were interrogated in the process. In addition, binary logistic regression models for ex-smoking were fitted among 16277 current and former smokers. Adjustments were made for basic education, age, nature of employment, occupational status, and marital status in all the analyses. Responders with high effort-reward imbalance or lower rewards were more probability to be smokers. An increased affinity to higher smoking intensity was related with higher job strain and higher effort-reward 5

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imbalance and their various components such as low job control and low rewards. The intensity of smoking among women was also higher in active jobs, and among employees with low-effort expenses in passive jobs. High effort-reward imbalance, high job demands, high job strain and were associated with a higher probability of being a current smoker among current and former smokers. Lower effort was associated with a higher likeliness of ex-smoking. This study shows a connection between smoking and stress at workplace and it can be implied that smoking surcease programmes might get benefitted from taking into account the changes in the stressful features of workplace environment.

Conclusion Most of the existing research provides comprehended social support as an efficacious tool of managing stress at work. Various research have aimed to test this hypothesis by questioning the moderators role attributed to comprehended social support from the seniors and subordinates in the relationship between stress and role conflict among proximity managers (MP) and middle managers (MI) in the public sector. The job demands-resources model acts here as a theoretical framework. According to this model, the perceived social support is a professional resource that can help to negate the adverse effects of job demands on mental health condition. The information collected from about 310 managers in local public administration partially confirms the hypothesis. In fact, the research does not initially support the moderating influence of comprehended social support from the seniors and subordinates in the relationship between perceived stress and role conflict among MI. Similar results have been found in some of the case studies done among MP. As a result, the very idea of non-mobilization of social support as a resource for managers in a few cases is put forward in discussing these results. These results show that the effectuality of the comprehended social support depends on several factors: the source and the nature of the comprehended social support, the status of the managers concerned (MI and MP) and the type of role conflict. Therefore, the MP seems to be more open to reception to the social support of their seniors than the MI when facing the role conflicts and, consequently, this leads to a decrease in the stress levels. The professional skills of MP need to be recognized in order to manage the stress that is caused by their role conflicts. Several relaxation techniques can help us bring our stress levels down by a significant amount. Meditation, Exercises in regular intervals, getting ample amount of sleep, avoiding trans fats and excessive sugar, deep breathing exercises, taking time-outs or breaks in between hectic schedule, getting engaged in activities that help us relax and taking a musical detour can be helping in cutting down the stress levels in an individual and helping him/her to perform better in his/her work sphere.

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List of Articles Referred:

1. Paul E. Spector, August 2002, Employee Control and Occupational Stress, Current Directions in Psychological Science, Vol. 11, No. 4, Pages 133-136 2. Sheldon Cohen, Denise Janicki-Deverts and Gregory E. Miller; October 10, 2007, Psychological Stress and Disease, Journal of American Medical Association, Vol. 298, No. 14, Pages 16851687 3. R. Jay Turner, Blair Wheaton and Donald A. Lloyd; Feb. 1995, The Epidemiology of Social Stress, American Sociological Review, Vol. 60, No. 1, Pages 104-125 4. Scott Schieman, Yuko Kurashina Whitestone and Karen Van Gundy; Sep. 2006, The Nature of Work and the Stress of Higher Status, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 47, No. 3, Pages 242-257 5. Anat Drach-Zahavy and Anat Freund, May 2007, Team Effectiveness under Stress: A Structural Contingency Approach, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Vol. 28, No. 4 , Pages 423-450 6. Anne Kouvonen, Mika Kivimki, Marianna Virtanen, Jaana Pentti and Jussi Vahtera; Jan. 2005, Work Stress, Smoking Status, and Smoking Intensity: An Observational Study of 46190 Employees, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, Vol. 59, No. 1, Pages 63-69 7. Lilach Hadany, Tuvik Beker, Ilan Eshel and Marcus W. Feldman; Apr. 7, 2006; Why Is Stress so Deadly? An Evolutionary Perspective, Proceedings: Biological Sciences, Vol. 273, No. 1588, Pages 881-885 8. Priscilla Elsass, May 2000, Stress and the Workload of Professional Women in Sweden, The Academy of Management Executive, Vol. 14, No. 2, Pages 123-124 9. Paul Barringer and David Orbuch, Jan-Feb 2013; Stress, Wellness, and Compliance, Journal of Health Care Compliance, Pages 23-28