Motto

Stress is sometimes the price many people are happy to pay for a successful career. It is also a factor that sends successful careers to their downfall.

10.1 PERSONAL DIFFERENCES

Different people have different ‘stress triggers’. A person can cope very well and enjoy a highly demanding business environment working with sophisticated computer systems dealing with future commodities. Put that same person in front of kindergarten children, and the stress level can become unbearable. Take the same library worker from the Q1 example, and ask her to deal with anxious students needing a limited number of books before exams and arrogant academics demanding books required for their research but are not on the shelf where they are supposed to be, and the same person will suffer considerable stress. Dealing with people, dealing with information technology, dealing with numbers – each task requires different faculties and qualities, and can put certain people under severe stress, whereas for others it would be a preferred situation to manage.

Individual personality is then a major factor. Cattell’s 16PF (Cattell & Kline, 1977) is an example of a validated tool that can help to identify right or wrong fit.

Let us look at the following five of the 16 factors:

• emotional vs. emotionally stable;
• shy, restrained vs. venturesome, bold;
• tough minded vs. tender minded;
• confident, complacent vs. worrying, insecure; and in particular
• relaxed, tranquil vs. tense, frustrated.

These factors are crucial in figuring out which type of person might be inclined to high stress if allocated a role in the Q2 or Q4 quadrants. Someone who is ‘venturesome, bold’, who finds himself positioned in a quiet, monotonous role, would suffer stress due to under-load, whereas someone who is ‘tender minded’ and perhaps also ‘worrying, insecure’ would be under the danger of a nervous breakdown if positioned in a role within the Q4 environment.

Many other factors can influence people’s careers and priorities. Some are demographics, though most are related to individual differences associated with personality, values and competences. Gender impact is relevant, as are many other areas of individual differences and managerial practices. Working women have to endure the dual stress of work and being the major child carer and thus are more inclined to suffer stress (Hobfoll et al., 1994). Differences related to occupational level and/or gender were found for autonomy and social support at work, competitiveness, gender role and reported conflict between demands from paid work and other responsibilities (Frankenhaeuser et al., 1989). The stress profile of female managers was considered in terms of possible long-term health risks.

Mainiero and Sullivan (2006), in their Kaleidoscope Careers, identified three ‘mirrors’ through which people examine their career priorities. These are:

• Authenticity: a striving to be genuine, to be one’s true self, to create a healthy alignment between one’s values and outward behaviours.
• Balance: finding a healthy congruence between work and non-work.
• Challenge: the need to continuously learn and find stimulating, exciting work.

They argue that two factors are instrumental in setting career priorities across the three ‘mirrors’ – career stage and gender. Alpha and Beta are identified as two ‘archetypes’:

• Alpha – mostly characterizing males:
  • early life into midlife: focus on challenge;
  • latter part of midlife: focus on authenticity;
  • later life: focus on balance.
• Beta – mostly characterizing females:
  • early life: focus on challenge;
  • midlife: focus on balance;
  • later life: focus on authenticity.

Intuitively, high challenge may cause certain stress levels, which can be energizing for further career investment, but less so when people find they cannot manage the stress. The need for balance emerges from levels of stress in ones career.

A different factor influencing feelings of stress is the ability to control a situation. Less ambiguity reduces stress (Cooper, 1983, 1998, 2002). Studies showed that being in control, even when the situation is apparently highly stressful, enables executives to feel less stressed (Baruch & Woodward, 1998).

More generally, looking at an integrated model of career stages (Baruch, 2004, p. 54), different sources for stress, which might arise in different stages of a person’s career, can be identified (Table 10.1).

As can be seen, stress-inducing issues vary across the career stages. One in particular, which spans over the whole career cycle, is the need for money. While positive thinking and philosophical writing suggest that money is not a strong motivator, lack of money is certainly a major stressor. The use of money will vary – from getting on the housing ladder, to purchasing basics and luxuries, through to enabling dignified retirement (see Feldman, 2007, p. 163). People need money, people need purpose, and people need fulfilment. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is not dead, but for different people the priorities vary, and they certainly vary throughout the different career stages. People make mistakes along the way – and while we can learn best from mistakes, studies about career mistakes are rarely reported in the literature. A typical mistake can be a mismatch between expectations and reality, which may arise because expectations are based on individual experience rather than on information provided by the organization (Blenkinsopp & Zdunczyk, 2005).

As I mentioned in my book (Baruch, 2004), a major difference between the early models on career stages and the integrated model is the ability and availability of re-running stages (b)–(e) (see Table 10.1) for another round or more of the career cycle. This is a significant contribution to stress release for people. In the past people were stuck in a career, having no real choice to move on. In contemporary labour markets, people are more free to chose and change their careers (Hall, 1996, 2002). Contemporary labour markets are dynamic and career changes are frequent, many times initiated and led by individuals (Hall, 1996; Peiperl & Baruch, 1997). Not everyone can move easily, though. People may find they are stuck in a certain career, not progressing, and yet do not have the ability or will to change, they are at a plateau, which can be another factor causing stress (Elsass & Ralston, 1989).

Career-related stressors may come in the shape of too fast success, too low success, plateau in success, or the ‘wrong’ type of success (Derr, 1986). Derr pointed out five individual career success indicators or dimensions:

• Getting ahead: motivation derives from the need to advance both in professional standing and up the organizational ladder.
• Getting secure: having a solid position within the organization.
• Getting high: being inspired by the nature and content of the work performed.
• Getting free: being motivated by a need for autonomy and the ability to create your own work environment.
• Getting balanced: attaching equal or greater value to non-work interests.

People with different career aims are inclined to suffer stress for different reasons. For example, if someone’s aim is to reach the top of the ladder at any cost, this is a case of extreme careerism, which may mean that certain people are too eager and ambitious, leading to manipulative behaviour on their side (Bratton & Kacmar, 2004). Such a rat-race career is very stressing, and if a person does not reach their aim it leads to frustration, inevitable when many aim to reach the top, where positions are few and contenders are many. Others who look for autonomy may benefit from an entrepreneurship career (Fuller & Tian, 2006). Having one’s own business puts high risk on the entrepreneur, again a possible source of stress.

Thus, the role of management, as I will elaborate on later, is to realize the various sources for stress, and to treat different people in different ways. This is not to say by discrimination – all should have equal opportunity. Yet, sense-making means realization and acceptance of differences.

10.2 WHAT IS THE ‘RIGHT’ LEVEL OF STRESS?

Figure 10.2 shows the inverse U curve relationship between stress and performance. Basically it builds on the activation theory, which anticipates behaviour related to variations in task design (Scott, 1966). Too low level of stress might lead to withdrawal, lack of interest and stimuli. Too high level of stress might lead to lack of ability to cope, and withdrawal due to over-load.

The cognitive activation theory of stress (CATS), suggested by Ursin and Eriksen (2004), used the term ‘stress’ for four aspects: stress stimuli; stress experience; the non-specific, general stress response; and experience of the stress response. Activation theory (Berlyne, 1960, 1963; Fiske & Maddi, 1961) argues that people, employees in the context of work and careers, try to alter their stimulus field so as to attain an optimal level of the potential to create personal stimulation. When the actual stimulation is below the optimal level, discomfort in the form of boredom results. When the stimulation is above that optimal level, it produces discomfort in the form of stress. Both boredom and stress are negative affective states.

The stress response is a general alarm in a homeostatic system, producing general and unspecific neurophysiological activation from one level of stimulation to another. Stress response is an essential and necessary response (Ursin & Eriksen, 2004). The unpleasantness of the alarm is no health threat. However, if sustained, the response may lead to negative results – in terms of work attitudes, behaviours, as well as physiological results such as illness. Much research was conducted following Beehr and Newman’s (1978) call for further study on the impact of job stress on employees’ health.

Stressors can operate at individual and organizational level. Up to this point my emphasis has been at the individual level of analysis.

10.3 STRESS MANAGEMENT – ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Moving to the organizational level, there are major factors contributing to a level of stress for individual employees (at all levels, including managerial). The prominent ones are general change, in particular changes involving restructuring and downsizing – not only for those made redundant, but for the survivors too (Brokner et al., 1992). Mergers and acquisitions (Cartwright & Cooper, 1996; Larsson & Finkelstein, 1999) and overall anxiety (Baruch & Lambert, 2007) are catalysts for increased stress levels across organizations.

Again, it must be remembered that while change might cause stress, having no change is not an option in the current dynamic business and social environment. Steadiness in time of environmental dynamism means lack of ability to respond. This too can generate stress.

The following list of stress-related organizational causes was suggested by Quick and Quick (1984): task demands; physical demands; role demands; and interpersonal demands. Of these, task and role demands are strongly associated with career-related stress.

Schabracq and Cooper (2000) elaborated further:

• too many working hours, unsocial hours and global traveling;
• inadequately coordinated tasks, leading to task interruptions, territorial and role conflicts;
• role ambiguity, ambiguous and unclear goals, priorities, procedures; too variable and too loosely connected tasks;
• too difficult and complex tasks, demanding instant creativity;
• having to take too many decisions, often with serious consequences, often based on insufficient information;
• risks of making mistakes;
• working in different and changing configurations of very diverse people;
• exposure to ‘contagiously’ stressful colleagues;
• exposure to frequent changes in tasks, equipment, managers, colleagues, working arrangements, production processes and jobs;
• spill-over to other life domains;
• organizational changes such as acquisitions^∗ , outsourcing, lay-off and job mobility between organizations.

The CAST – Career Active System Triad (see Figure 10.3) – manifests how individuals and organizations plan and manage careers at three different levels. At the individual level, relating to career-related stress, people may take various actions, as described in the early section of this chapter. At the organizational level, the organization needs to develop a set of policies, derived from its strategy and leading philosophy of management. Employing ‘best practice’ would help to control and reduce high levels of stress and ensure people have enough stimuli to avoid under-load stress induced reactions.

The challenges for the organization are to maintain a fit between individual needs, competences and career aims and the organizational operational and future goals.

Gaining both procedural and distributive justice is of high relevance in generating acceptable psychological contracts (Herriot & Pemberton, 1996). Matching individual career plans and organizational career management is a real test for managing the new psychological contract. The concept is not new (see Granrose & Portwood, 1987).

Rousseau argues that people gain specific employment arrangements that, on the positive side, enable flexibility, but may also lead to injustice (Rousseau, 2004, p. 265). A number of career management practices exists (see Baruch 1999, 2004), many of these can help in maintaining career-related stress at a manageable level. Later in this chapter I will focus on such cases.

However, there are also negative practices. An example of problematic practices is forcing employees and managers to work overtime (Peiperl & Jones, 2001). Long hour culture is a clear factor that causes spill-over from work to family life, generating inevitable conflicts (Bellavia & Frone, 2005). Lee and Ashforth’s (1996) meta-analysis examined how demand and resource correlates and behavioural and attitudinal correlates were related to three different dimensions of job burnout. They found that emotional exhaustion is more strongly related to the demand correlates than to the resource correlates, suggesting that workers might have been sensitive to the possibility of resource loss.

Job strain (job dissatisfaction, depression, psychosomatic symptoms) and burnout were found to be higher in jobs that combine high workload demands with low decision latitude (Landsbergis, 1988). Indeed, being in control is a factor that reduces stress even in highly demanding positions and roles (Baruch & Woodward, 1998).

While Clarke and Cooper (2004, p. 23) lamented the apparent lack of studies on the specific impact of work-related stress on people’s careers, some issues such as burnout have been intensively studied. There is clear evidence based on empirical research that supports the assumptions that high levels of work stress lead to negative work outcomes (Harpaz & Snir, 2003; Porter, 2004; Spence & Robbins, 1992), and non-work outcomes (Bonebright, Clay & Ankenmann, 2000; Gini, 1998). The mechanism by which stress leads to such outcomes is typically via burnout, and the results of burnout are detrimental to people’s career and well-being (Westman & Eden, 1997). Another direction of the relationship is that career stressors like lack of promotion opportunities lead to negative outcomes, such as involuntary turnover (Jones et al., 2007; 2008McCabe et al., 2008; Reisenberg, 2005) and even accidents (Clarke & Cooper, 2004, p. 144). Short-term fix-it solutions would not necessarily work in the long run. For example, providing a vacation is not a long-term solution, as stress levels are fast to return within a short time (Westman & Eden, 1997).

It is hard, probably impossible to ‘win’ the delicate balance of maintaining career-related stress. There are a number of stressors, many of them that are not under the control of a single person or organization. And as indicated, it is not about simply minimizing stress, but finding the right measure, the optimal level, a moving target which depends on individual characteristics, and changes as time goes by.

10.4 A PORTFOLIO OF STRESS-RELATED CAREER MANAGEMENT PRACTICES

Below is listed the wide portfolio of career management practices that may be associated with stress management (for the full list see Baruch, 1999, 2004). Clear practices can help in controlling and reducing negative stress, even in a ‘lean production’ environment (Conti et al., 2006).