Freedom, Inc_ - Brian M. Carney [24]
Someone took credit for your work.
Someone made a negative comment about your intelligence or competence.
You were a target of rumors or gossip.
You were excluded from a work-related or social meeting.
You were given the silent treatment.
Others failed to warn you about impending dangers.
You were denied a raise or promotion without being given a valid reason.29
All the big and small stressors trigger negative emotional reactions in us, most often anger or anxiety. From there, the road to the stress symptoms—called strains—is all downhill. Sometimes, it is true, stress leads to constructive actions aiming to cope with the stressor, such as getting the needed information from somebody else. But most often, the reaction is destructive—flight or fight. And right alongside come those “bad” companions—increased adrenaline, blood pressure, and heart rate—and the health damage that follows. In some corporate cultures, it is normal to belittle those who react badly to what some consider “ordinary” work-related stress. But this is a serious mistake: Research has shown that stressful work incidents are even more damaging to our well-being and health than major stressors in our personal lives.
So what’s the bottom line on stress for the economy? Studies estimate the cost for U.S. businesses could be $150 billion to $300 billion a year or more from stress-induced absenteeism, lost productivity, and health expenditures. And the hidden cost to your business? According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual cost of stress is $10,000 per employee.
Fortunately there is one extremely important potential ameliorating factor for workplace stress: the perceived control an employee has over her work. First, when a person believes she has a high degree of control over an event or situation, she judges it as less stressful, even as simply “challenging.” Military fighter pilots don’t typically report seeing their flight missions, even in combat, as stressful—because they have complete control over their jobs. In fact, training flights may be more stressful than real missions because trainees do not yet feel totally in control of their aircraft or tasks. Second, this perception of control minimizes a person’s “emotional reaction” to the stressor. For example, facing a sudden upsurge in clients, a salesperson who feels in control of her work will be confident that she’ll find a way to adjust and keep the workload manageable. Hence, her emotions, instead of becoming negative, may even bring a positive feeling of challenge. Finally, high perceived control may lead to the search for constructive responses to the stressful event.
Why is this important? Because for a person with a low level of control over her work, the reaction is quite different. Not believing that she can change the way she does her work, she’ll engage in the destructive actions of fleeing or fighting to reduce her emotional distress and feel better. Three psychologists, Hans Bosma, Stephen Stansfeld, and Michael Marmot, spent five years studying the stress levels of more than ten thousand British civil servants. And what they found was that men who feel that they have little control over their jobs—whether that is true or not—are 50 percent more likely to develop heart disease than those who feel as if they are in control of their jobs. For women, it’s even worse—the risk is 100 percent higher, presumably because they often work in positions that have even less job control than men. Bosma and associates suggest that such control and freedom of choice may be a universal human need. But they say more: “Especially in bureaucratic organizations, this need may not be satisfied for those at the bottom of the hierarchy…. In such strongly regulated organizations, control may be especially relevant, because persons with control can possibly more easily escape from bureaucratic procedures and more often may know the manifest and latent rules concerning the distribution of rewards.”30
This is one way