STRESS & COUNSELING

Chapter 15

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15.

STRESS
(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) What do you understand by Job Stress ? What are the Cause of Job Related Stress ? State the Symptoms of Job related Stress Briefly Describe the Approaches to Stress Management What are the Sources of Job Stress ?

15.

COUNSELING
(i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) Define Employee Counseling ? Discuss the Type of Counseling is More Effective ? Methods of Employee Counseling ? Indentify the Characteristics of Counseling ? What are the Main Function of Employee Counselling ? Explain the Managers Counseling Role ?

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What do you Understand by Job Stress ?

Stress Defined Stress is a persons adaptive response to a stimulus that places excessive psychological or physical demands on that person.

Work Stress and Its Management Stress A dynamic condition in which an individual is confronted with an opportunity , constraint, or demand related to what he or she desires and for which the outcome is perceived to be both uncertain and important.

There are 4 main categories of stress, namely eustress, distress, hyper stress and hypo stress. Negative stress can cause many physical and psychological problems, whilst positive stress can be very helpful for us. Heres how we differentiate between them. Eustress: this is a positive form of stress, which prepares your mind and body for the imminent challenges that it has perceived. Eustress is a natural physical reaction by your body which increases blood flow to your muscles, resulting in a higher heart rate. Athletes before a competition or perhaps a manager before a major presentation would do well with eustress, allowing them to derive the inspiration and strength that is needed. Distress: We are familiar with this word, and know that it is a negative form of stress. This occurs when the mind and body is unable to cope with changes, and usually occurs when there are deviations from the norm. They can be categorized into acute stress and chronic stress.
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Acute stress is intense, but does not last for long. On the other hand, chronic stress persists over a long period of time. Trigger events for distress can be a change in job scope or routine that the person is unable to handle or cope with. Hyper stress: This is another form of negative stress that occurs when the individual is unable to cope with the workload. Examples include highly stressful jobs, which require longer working hours than the individual can handle. If you suspect that you are suffering from hyper stress, you are likely to have sudden emotional breakdowns over insignificant issues, the proverbial straws that broke the camels back. It is important for you to recognize that your body needs a break, or you may end up with severe and chronic physical and psychological reactions. Hypo stress: Lastly, hypo stress occurs when a person has nothing to do with his time and feels constantly bored and unmotivated. This is due to an insufficient amount of stress; hence some stress is inevitable and helpful to us. Companies should avoid having workers who experience hypo stress as this will cause productivity and mindfulness to fall. If the job scope is boring and repetitive, it would be a good idea to implement some form of job rotation so that there is always something new to learn.

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What are the Causes of Job Related Stress ?

Determinants Stress
Job Characteristics

of

Job

A major source of job stress is a persons role in the organization. A role is simply the set of expectations that other people in the organization have for an individual, For example, supervisors, coworkers, customers and suppliers expect an employee to behave in certain predictable ways. The expectations others have of an employee arc sometimes unclear, in conflict, or too high for the employee to meet within the time allotted, and he or she experiences stress.

Role Ambiguity: When there is a lot of uncertainty surrounding job definitions or job expectations, people experience role ambiguity. With the recent increase in mergers and acquisitions among major organizations, more and more employees arc experiencing job stress as a result of role ambiguity. Role ambiguity is anxiety arousing among employees that leads to job stress.

Role Conflict: Often employees discover that different groups of people in an organization have widely varying expectations of them, and that they

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cannot meet all those expectations. This inconsistency of expectations associated with a role is called role conflict, which results in stress.

Role Overload: Role overload is a situation in which employees feel they are being asked to do more than time or ability permits. Working under time pressure is especially stressful.

Role Underload: Role Underload is the condition in which employees have too little work to do or too little variety -in their work. For example, salespeople in a store with no customer, standing around all day with nothing to do, could be said to experience role underload. Ironically, role underload leads to low self-esteem, increased frequency of nervous symptoms and increased health problems.

Ethical Dilemmas: Ethical dilemmas such as whether or not one should report the observed unethical behaviors of another person can cause extreme levels of stress in individuals. This will be especially true for those who have strong moral values of right and wrong and a deep sense of personal and corporate social responsibility. Tensions arise because one might have to contend against ones own colleagues who might be close friends, and may fear of reprisal and other undesirable consequences.

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State the Symptoms of Stress ?

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Briefly describe the Approaches to Stress Management ?

Individuals and Organisational Approaches to Managing Stress

As we know that stress has got a number of negative consequences for the individuals, that is why every individual should take personal responsibility for reducing his or her stress level. There are a number of ways by which a person can either avoid stressful conditions, change them or learn to cope with them. Stress can be managed by an individual, which will enable him to regain control over his life.

Some of the stress reducing strategies from individuals point of view are : 1. Knowledge About Stress. In the first stage, an individual should become knowledgeable about stress. He should know about the process and effects of stress. He must find out the major sources of his stress. He must anticipate stressful periods and plan accordingly in advance. He must be honest with himself and decide what he can cope with what he cannot. 2. Physiological Fitness. Excercise in any form can help people in coping with the stress. Non competitive physical excercise such as aerobics, walking, jogging, swimming, riding a bicycle, playing softball or tennis have been recommended by physicians as a way to deal with excessive stress levels. There is evidence to suggest that individuals who excercise are much less likely to suffer from certain types of stress related excercises. With proper exercise, diet control and non-smoking habits, blood pressure and cholesterol become controlled and the body becomes more resistant to pressures. People are more likely to get physically sick or emotionally depressed if they are over weight or poorly nourished. 3. Time Management. Most of the people are very poor in managing their time. They dont know that what must be done and when it would be desirable to do so. The result of poor time management is feeling of work overload, skipped schedules and tension. A well organised person can often accomplish twice as much as the person who is poorly organised. Therefore, an individual must understand how to manage his time so that he can cope with tensions created by job demands. A few of the well known time management principles are :

Preparing a daily list of activities to be attended to. Prioritizing activities by importance and urgency. Scheduling activities according to the priorities set. Knowing your daily schedule and handling the most demanding parts of a job when you are most alert and productive.

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4. Assertiveness. An individual should become assertive. He should not say Yes when he wants to say No. He should start saying No to people or managers who demand too much of his time. Being assertive is an important factor in reducing stress. 5. Social Support Network. Every person should have people to turn to, talk to and rely upon. Good friends become highly supportive during times of stress and crisis. Social net work includes friends, family or work colleagues. Expanding your social support system can be a means for tension reduction because friends are there when needed and provide support to get the person through stressful situations. 6. Readjust life Goals. Every individual must know what he really wants to do. This should relate to not only the major decisions of the life but to all activities in our life. He must know what is important for him. Because of the severe competition in life to go ahead, most individuals set very high standards and goals for themselves. These high expectations and limited resources to reach such expectations result in stress. Accordingly, every person must readjust his goals and make sure he has the ability and resources to reach such goals. Perhaps the goals should be established after the resources have been analysed. 7. Relaxation Techniques. Every individual must teach himself to reduce tension through relaxation techniques such as Yoga, mediation, hypnosis and biofeedback. 15-20 minutes a day of deep relaxation releases tension and provides a person with pronounced sense of peacefulness. Deep relaxation conditions will bring significant changes in heart rate, blood pressure and other physiological factors. Yoga is probably the most effective remedy for stress. Studies have revealed that Yoga has cured several stress related diseases. 8. Plan your life in Advance. So many times, people create situations which induce stress because they either did not plan or did a bad job of planning. The traditional Indian attitude of whatever will be, will be a way of accepting the unexpected difficulties in li fe. This attitude may be relevant in those situations over which we do not have any control like death in the family, but for other events in life, it is better to plan in advance, so that we can confront them with confidence when they occur. Individuals may design their own strategies to reduce stress, but it is a must for the organisations to develop programmes that will help the employees in reducing their stress. This will lead to less employee turnover, absenteeism and as a result productivity will improve. Some of the measures which organisations can take are : 1. Selection and Placement. Individuals differ in their response to stress situations. We know that Type A individuals are more prone to stress. On the other hand, in the organisations there are certain jobs which are more stressful as compared to other jobs. While doing the selection and placement of the employees, these factors must be kept in mind. The individuals who are more prone to stress should not be put on jobs which are stressful. The individuals who are less prone to stress may adapt better to high stress jobs and perform those jobs more effectively. 2. Goal Setting. Based on extensive amount of research it has been concluded that individuals perform better when they have specific and challenging goals and they receive feedback on how well they are progressing towards those goals. Goal setting can reduce stress as well as provide motivation. It will result in less employee frustration, role ambiguity and stress. 3. Improved Communication. Sometimes due to lack of effective communication from the superiors, the employees do not know what they have to do and how they have to do it. This result in role ambiguity. Similarly, when two or more persons have contradicting role demands from an employee, it leads to role conflict if there is lack of proper communication. Effective communication with employees reduces the uncertainty by lessening role ambiguity and role conflict. 4. Redesigning Jobs. Organisations should redesign the jobs in such a way as to give employees more responsibility, more meaningful work, more autonomy and increased feed back. This will help reduce the stress caused by monotony, routine work, work overload or underload and role ambiguity. Job redesigning enhances motivation, reduces the stress among the employees and enhances Quality of work life. 5. Participative Decision Making. If the organisations give the employees participation in those decisions that directly affect them and their job performance, it can increase employee control and reduce the role stress. The main reason of role stress is that employees feel uncertain about their goals, expectations and how they will be evaluated. These uncertainties can be reduced by the management by giving the employees a right to participate in the decision making. 6. Building Teamwork. The management should try to create such work environment in which there is no provision for interpersonal conflict or inter group conflict. Such conflicts are the causes of stress, such should be prevented from building or eliminated if they develop. Accordingly such team work should be developed that groups and the members are mutually supportive and productive. Members of the group should consider themselves as members of the same family and seek social support from each other. 7. Personal Wellness Programmes. These personal wellness programmes focus on the employees total physical and mental condition. Organisations can provide facilities at their premises for physical fitness such as gyms, swimming pools, tennis courts etc. as well as psychological counselling. They should hold seminars or workshops to make the employees understand nature and sources of stress and the possible ways to reduce it. These workshops should help those individuals who are already under stress. Moreover, a supervisor can impact personal wellness of his subordinates through positive example, encouragement and by practising the basic concepts and techniques of human resource management.

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What are the Sources of Job Stress ?

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Task Demands Stressors associated with the specific job a person performs. Some occupations are by nature more stressful than others. Physical Demands Stressors associated with the jobs physical setting, such as the adequacy of temperature and lighting. Role Demands Stressors associated with the role a person is expected to play. Role ambiguity arises when a role is unclear. Role conflict occurs when the messages and cues constituting a role are clear but contradictory or mutually exclusive. Role overload occurs when expectations for the role exceed the individuals capacity. Interpersonal Demands Stressors associated with group pressures, leadership, and personality conflicts. Behavioral Consequences The behavioral consequences of stress, such as alcohol abuse, may harm the person under stress or others. Psychological Consequences Psychological consequences relate to a persons mental health and well-being. Medical Consequences Medical consequences affect a persons physical wellbeing. Heart disease and stroke, among other illnesses, have been linked to stress. Performance One clear organizational consequence of too much stress is a decline in performance. Withdrawal The most significant forms of withdrawal behavior are absenteeism and quitting. Attitudes
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 Stress can have a negative effect on job satisfaction, morale, organizational commitment, and motivation to perform at high levels. Burnout Is the general feeling of exhaustion that develops when an individual simultaneously experiences too much pressure and has too few sources of satisfaction.

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Define Employee Counseling ?

Counselling is a process of helping people to learn how to solve certain interpersonal, emotional and decision problems.

Counseling is discussion with and employee of a problem that usually has emotional content in order to help the employee cote with it better.

The term counseling refers to the help given by a superior to his subordinate in improving the latters performance.

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Discuss the Type of Counseling is More Effective ?

Types of Employee Counseling In attempting to help an employee who has a problem, a variety of counseling approaches are used. All of these counseling approaches, however, depend on active listening. Sometimes the mere furnishing of information or advice may be the solution to what at first appeared to be a knotty problem. More frequently, however, the problem cannot be solved easily because of frustrations or conflicts that are accompanied by strong feelings such as fear, confusion, or hostility. A manager, therefore, needs to learn to use whatever approach appears to be suitable at the time. Flexibility is a key component of the employee counseling process. 1. Directive Counseling: It is full counseling. It is the process of listening to an employees problem, deciding with the employee what should be done and telling and motivating the employee to do it. This type of counseling mostly does the function of advice, reassurance and communication. It may also perform other functions of counseling. 2. Non-directive Counseling: In non-directive counseling, the employee is permitted to have maximum freedom in determining the course of the interview. It is the process of skillfully listening and encouraging a counselee to explain troublesome problems, understand them and determine appropriate solutions6. Fundamentally, the approach is to listen, with understanding and without criticism or appraisal, to the problem as it is described by the employee. The employee is encouraged, through the managers attitude and reaction to what is said or not said, to express feelings without fear of shame, embarrassment, or reprisal. The free expression that is encouraged in the nondirective approach tends to reduce tensions and frustrations. The employee who has had an opportunity to release pent-up feelings is usually in a better position to view the problem more objectively and with a problem-solving attitude. 3. Participative Counseling: Both directive and non-directive methods suffer from limitations. While the former is often not accepted by independent employees, the latter
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needs professionals to operate and hence is costly. Hence, the counseling used in most situations is in between these two. This middle path is known as participative counseling. Participative is a counselor-counselee relationship that establishes a cooperative exchange of ideas to help solve an employees problems. It is neither wholly counsellor-centred nor wholly counselee-centred. Counselor and counselee mutually apply their different knowledge, perceptions, skills, perspectives and values to problem into the problems and find solutions.

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Methods of Employee Counseling ?

Methods of Employee Counseling Effectiveness of counselling largely depends on the methods and techniques as well as the skills used by the counsellor. Methods and techniques of counceling change from person to person and from situation to situation. Normally employee counseling involves the following methods: 1. Desensitization: According to Desensitization, once an animal has been shocked in a particular situation, it will continue to avoid it indefinitely. This is quite true in respect of human beings also. Once an individual is shocked in a particular situation, he gives himself no chance for the situation to recur. This method can be used to overcome avoidance reactions, so as to improve the emotional weak spots. If an employee is once shocked by the behavior, approach or action of his superior, he would continue to avoid that superior. It is difficult for such superiors to be effective counselors, unless such superiors prove otherwise through their behavior or action on the contrary. Similarly, once an employee is shocked by a particular situation, he can be brought back to that situation only if he will be convinced through desensitization that the shock will not to take place further. Counselor can make use of desensitization in such situations. 2. Catharsis: Discharge of emotional tensions can be called catharsis. Emotional tensions can be discharged by talking them out or by relieving of the painful experience which engendered them. It is an important technique as a means of reducing the tensions associated with anxiety, fear, hostility, or guilt. Catharsis helps to gain insight into the ways an emotional trauma has been affecting the behavior. 3. Insight: With the help of insight one may find that he has devalued himself unnecessarily, or his aspirations were unrealistic, or that his childish interpretation of an event was inaccurate. Then he can overcome his weakness. 4. Developing the new patterns: Developing new patterns becomes very often necessary when other methods to deal with weak spots remain ineffective. In order to develop
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new, more satisfying emotional reactions, the individual needs to expose himself to situations where he can experience positive feelings. The manager who deals with such individuals may motivate or instigate them to put themselves into such situations, so that their self-confidence may increase.

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Identify the characteristics of Counseling ?

Characteristics of Employee Counseling 1. Counseling is an exchange of ideas and feelings between two people. 2. It tries to improve organizational performance by helping the employees to cope with the problems. 3. It makes organization be more human and considerate with peoples problems. 4. Counseling may be performed by both professionals and non-professionals. 5. Counseling is usually confidential in order to have free talk and discussions. 6. It involves both job and personal problems.

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What are the Main Function of Employee Counseling ?

Functions of Employee Counseling The general objective of counseling is to help employees to improve their mental health and develop in self-confidence, understanding, self-control and ability to work effectively. This objective can be achieved by performing various counseling functions. They are: 1. Advice: One of the important functions of counseling is offering advice to the counselee. The counselor has to understand the problem of the counselee completely, before offering advice and suggesting a course of action. 2. Reassurance: In order to give courage to face a problem confidently, counseling provides employees with reassurance. Normally reassurance is not acceptable to the counselee. However, it is useful in some situations. 3. Communication: Counseling will improve both upward and downward communication abilities of the counselees. 4. Release of Emotional Tension: Releasing emotional tension is an important function of counseling. People feel emotional release from their frustration after counseling. Release of tension may not solve the entire problem, but run over mental blocks to the solution. 5. Clarified Thinking: Release of tension and thereby removal of mental blocks to the solution through counseling allows the counselee to think freely and objectively. Thus, clarified thinking tends to be the result of emotional release. 6. Reorientation: Reorientation is not just emotional release or clear thinking, but it involves a change in the counselees psychic self through a change in the basic goals and values.

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Explain the Managers Counseling Role ?

Line Managers role in Counseling Listen to problems/Address Issues Provide Feedback and help counselee to see a different view point Investigate problems/matters Avoid word of mouth and see the root cause with evidence Suggest/Recommend solutions Observe behavior and clarify expectations Determine right course of action and reach conclusion Draft plan of action and follow up

The Basic Role of Manager are 1. Goal Setting : Letting staff know what they are supposed to do 2. Coaching : Making sure staff know how to do their jobs 3. Monitoring : Keeping tabs on Staff Performance 4. Feedback : Letting staff know how they are doing 5. Positive Reinforcement : Rewarding Good Performance

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