U. S. employees work harder now than ever before, and almost 75 percent report regularly experiencing job-related stress symptoms. Stress costs organizations an estimated $30 billion a year in lost productivity, and hundreds of billions a year if you include health care costs and absenteeism. This activity is important because managers can help to decrease unnecessary workplace stressors, and can help employees to experience fewer stress symptoms, if they are attuned to the sources from which workplace stress can manifest. The goal of this exercise is to challenge your knowledge of the six sources of work-related stress. For each person, choose the source of job-related stress that his or her example best depicts.
Demands created by individual differences
Individual task demands
Individual role demands
Worklife balance
group demands
Organizational demands
1. Cedrick tends to worry about things in his life, regardless of what’s going on in his job or whether he is facing anything objectively stressful.
2. Chien-Shiung has to miss his daughter’s softball game because he is committed to a work meeting.
3. Lourdes works as a barista at a very busy campus Starbucks location.
4. Danilo feels anxiety every morning on his commute to work thinking about the fact that he will be spending the next 8 hours with his coworkers who are neither kind nor helpful to one another.
5. Ang manages the front desk at a New York City hotel and has to pretend that he is happy and cheerful all day long, even when customers are rude to him or his employees.