Work and Stress

A Research Overview

Philip Dewe, Cary L Cooper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367347567
• eBook ISBN: 9781000095432
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Stress is a leading cause of ill health in the workplace. This shortform book analyses, summarises and contextualises research around stress at work.

The book begins by exploring the impact and challenges of technology and the challenging and changing contours and boundaries of the nature of work. Using a behaviour lens, the authors draw on cyberpsychology to illuminate the choices we make to balance life, work and wellbeing. The changing nature of work is analysed, shifting structures and boundaries explored and the stress consequences of such themes as the gig economy and precarious work are also included in the book.

A compelling framework for researchers of work, organisation and psychology, this concise book is also valuable reading for reflective practitioners, seeking to understand the importance of wellbeing in the workplace

Chapter 1

Organizational psychology, organizational behaviour and workplace stress

We begin this book by reflecting on alternative approaches and movements that have, since the beginning of this millennium, shaped organizational psychology and organizational behaviour, and set researchers with a responsibility to be mindful and to question what this means for workplace stress research. These developments spawned by economic crisis and turbulence, the ever present and always ready portable technologies, and the tsunami of globalization (Dewe & Cooper 2017) define the context of stress research. It is this context which shapes our research, gives it explanatory power, and sets the challenges for the direction and the relevance of what we do. These alternative approaches and movements acknowledge this context and, indeed, have significantly shaped our understanding and the state of our knowledge, and influenced the nature of our discipline; testing our ability as researchers to ‘achieve a more meaningful integration of findings across the array of topics researched’ (Porter & Schneider 2014, p. 15).

The ‘good news’, as Cooper (2009, p. 7) points out, is ‘that organizational behaviour [and organizational psychology] moves with the times, and reflects the issues, concerns and dilemmas of the age and beyond’. Nevertheless, these new pathways and new developments, coupled with the speed at which the context changes, its reach and authority, ‘calls for the refining of existing theories, methods and practice’ (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 93). It is a powerful reminder for us to recognize and, at times, question not just where our theories are taking us, but also how well they express the realities of the workplace. Giving power and legitimacy to concepts like context, relevance, refinement and, of course, our moral responsibilities to those whose working lives we research (Dewe & Cooper 2017). Taken together these concepts provide a platform and a foundation for building and developing our research into workplace stress, giving it meaning and balance.

Alternative approaches and movements!

We begin by pointing to the movements that have shaped our discipline, turning first to exploring the scope and reach of what has become known as the positive psychology movement (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi 2000). Positive psychology ‘has experienced extraordinary growth in the past decade’ elevating it to the status of a ‘popular culture movement’ (Hart & Sasso 2011, pp. 82; 88). Recently researchers have ‘taken stock’ and explored ‘trends’ in this movement, suggesting that its boundaries are changing and ‘a new identity is emerging for positive psychology in the second decade of the millennium’ (Hart & Sasso 2011, pp. 82; 91). What has been described as ‘positive psychology 2.0’ offers a balanced approach that will ‘pay more attention to’ both ‘the positive and negative’, and so the need now is ‘to enhance the positives and manage the negatives in order to increase well-being and decrease mental illness’ moving ‘the focus away from individual happiness and success to a meaning-centred approach to making life better for all people’. This approach ‘depicts the complex interactions in living a full life … and embrace[s] life in totality’ – the good and the bad (Wong 2011, pp. 69; 77).

‘Following the lead of positive psychology’ saw the arrival in the workplace of the field of Positive Organizational Behavior (POB) (Youssef & Luthans 2007, p. 774) and Positive Organizational Scholarship (Cameron, Dutton & Quinn 2003). There is now, argues Youssef and Luthans, ‘an attempt to study new, or at least relatively unique to the workplace positive psychological resource capacities’ (2007, p. 775). Similarly, positive organizational scholarship offers a lens through which to examine ‘new or different mechanisms through which organizational dynamics and positive organizational processes produce extraordinary positive or unexpected outcomes’ (Cameron et al., 2003, p. 6). Both are oriented to investigating ‘human resource strengths and psychological capacities that can be measured, developed, and effectively managed’ (Youssef & Luthans 2007, p. 775). Building on a growing literature, POB’s four ‘criteria-meeting capacities’ selected for examination results in what the authors (Luthans, Youssef & Avolio 2007) call psychological capital (‘self-efficacy, optimism, hope, and resiliency’), ‘that operate additively but also perhaps, synergistically’ (p. 19). They, focus on the development of ‘positive psychological resource capacities’, ushering in new challenges for researchers to explore new programmes, new opportunities to examine other positive constructs (e.g. ‘creativity and wisdom’). Not forgetting the development of new innovations around training interventions that all reflect this new positive perspective, which offers a new era in workplace research and potential positive interventions (Luthans et al., 2007, p. 18).

Other changes are afoot. The dynamics of this changing context has brought innovation, creativity, new opportunities, and paradigms that shift the boundaries of organizational psychology and the focus of its investigations and research. Many of these changes are built around the ‘need to effectively adapt to changes, [as it] affects all people and all organizations’, offering to organizational psychology the opportunity to establish ‘a new mandate, helping individuals and organizations adjust to rapidly changing conditions’ (Muchinsky 2006, p. 23). These developments include the growing interest in well-being through the lens of human capital. As mentioned above, there is psychology capital (Luthans et al., 2007). But the ideas surrounding human capital now reflects a rich, and growing literature that covers: (i) intellectual capital (Roslender 2009; Roslender 2009a) – accounting for people – focuses on employees as ‘a crucial source of value’ for organizations, and ‘a resource that requires careful management, if it is to fulfil its maximum potential’ (Roslender & Fincham 2001, p. 383), (ii) hedonic capital (Graham & Oswald 2010) – ‘stocks of psychological resources available to an individual’ and ‘how it produces well-being’ (pp. 373; 374), and (iii) the ‘new human capital equation’ – ‘human capital and its contribution to business’ (Cascio 2007, p. 15). In addition, (iv) resource-based strategies – competing through people (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 15). Then there has been a call for the development of a psychology of older workers, as distinct from a psychology of ageing, drawing attention to the ‘age wave’ (Macik-Frey, Quick & Nelson 2007, p. 830) to capture the motivations and aspirations of older workers.

Then there is the need ‘to acknowledge the importance’ of occupational health psychology (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 91), bringing a perspective that investigates the need ‘to promote and protect’ the quality of working life and the health and well-being of workers (Barling & Griffiths 2003, p. 30; Dewe & Cooper 2017, pp. 90–91). In order to broaden its focus ‘we might modify the concept of occupational health psychology to organizational health psychology’ as it then offers an approach that ‘help[s] individuals and organizations (of all types) adapt to rapid and unrelenting change’ (Muchinsky 2006, p. 23). Not forgetting that we are ‘in the midst of an [affective] revolution’ (Barsade, Brief & Spataro 2003, p. 33), one that ‘was slow in coming even though the need for more research to understand this “missing ingredient” of organizational life has long been acknowledge’ (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 73; Fineman 2004, p. 720). The notion of ‘emotions at work’ has also found its place in work stress research, with the dictum from the work by Lazarus & Cohen-Charash (2001, p. 45) that ‘discrete emotions are the “coin of the realm” when exploring the coping process’.

Another entry shaping our discipline is the work surrounding ‘cyberpsychology’ (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 5). From a fast-growing literature, researchers have explored behaviours and concepts like ‘technostress’ (Tarafdar, Tu & Ragu-Nathan 2010), ‘problematic internet use’ (Chiang & Su 2012), ‘dependency and addiction’ (Griffiths 1995; 2010), ‘cyberslacking and cyberloafing’ (Lim & Chen 2012), and ‘cyberbullying’ (Sabella, Patchin & Hinduja 2013). While the term technostress was offered by Brod in 1982, this work has ‘found its voice and established its place in work stress research in the new millennium’ (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 121). We are ‘in a work environment that is now even more technologically and socially wired than ever before’ (Barjis, Gupta & Sharda 2011, p. 615). Now, with researchers emphasizing the ‘fourth dimensional’ nature of our world, our belief is the scope of work stress research should be broadened beyond technostress to capture the impact on our behaviours of this mobile ‘digital everywhereness’ (Scott 2016, p. 17). What Shadbolt and Hampson describe as ‘our hyper-complex environment’ (2018, p. 22). Technology is also reshaping leadership research. Here, Schwab argues, describing advances in technology as the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ ‘then this will demand a new type of leadership – systems leadership – [where] leadership will be needed on how these advances ‘are governed and the values they exhibit ‘in the way they affect’ people, organizations and communities’ (2018b, pp. 14–16; 220). Leadership research has also found itself, in this millennium, called to consider the issue of – ‘the confidence of the incompetent’ (Fritz 2019, p. 1/35; Kruger & Dunning 1999; Staub & Kaynak 2014).

A shift in focus to those forces shaping workplaces, we explore the globalization of the interest in well-being and the impact of this interest on the measuring of GNP, suggesting that GNP measurement needs to focus more on ‘social progression’ (OECD 2012, p. 2). Associated with this interest is the idea that GNP measurement should better express the ‘quality of life’. The OECD report (2009) suggests that ‘measures of subjective well-being provide key information about people’s “quality of life” and that statistical offices should incorporate questions to capture people’s life evaluations, hedonic experiences and priorities in their own surveys’ (Stiglitz, Sen & Fitoussi 2009, p. 58). With a significant movement towards expanding the scope of measuring GNP, a growing interest has also emerged in happiness at work, and what is meant by good work (OECD 2013; Graham & Oswald 2010; Coats & Lekhi 2008; Johnson, Robertson & Cooper 2018). These interests offer researchers the opportunity to review the work on discrete emotions, particularly happiness (Artz, Goodall & Oswald 2016; Warr & Clapperton 2010), and consider the value and explanatory potential it may add to the field of workplace stress.

When, Porter (2008) was asked to ‘ponder the future of organizational psychology’ (p. 524), he concludes, from his review, that there is ‘one thing [he is] certain’; ‘going forward, two Cs – context and change – will and should, receive much more concentrated research and scholarly attention than they have up to now. It will be a C × C world!’ (p. 525). It is this idea of ‘change and context’, two not mutually exclusive concepts, where one (change) shapes the other (context), are what, we are trying to express in this first chapter. Change and context are two powerful concepts that have, and are, shaping our discipline, and yet the explanatory power that resides in the context has yet to be exploited fully by researchers. In this instant, perhaps the most significant change – is in our understanding of the changing nature of work. Our understanding of future work arrangements ‘is central to filling in a portrait of the new future’ (Ashford, George & Blatt 2007, p. 106; Bevan, Brinkley, Bajorek & Cooper 2018).

These new forms of work arrangements and their growing significance and prevalence in the labour market (Spreitzer, Cameron & Garrett 2017; Cappelli & Keller 2013) presents ‘fundamental challenges for our theory and research about work and workers as well’ (Ashford et al., 2007, p. 66). The use of the ‘nonstandard’ term to describe this change is simply to give a norm ‘against which these workers contrast’ (Ashford et al., 2007, p. 68). Yet as our knowledge grows about this ‘nonstandard’ working, we may now wish to abandon the term ‘nonstandard’, as this type of working, however described, ‘is here to stay’ and ‘firmly rooted in the world of work’ (Spreitzer et al., 2017, p. 475). Enter the Gig economy (Mulcahy 2017). The growth of these employment arrangements is now embedded in, and transiting the workforce, and shaping the way work is changing. Leaving workplace commentators and researchers to consider whether their work is actually capturing the realities of the workforce and working life. All ‘powerful reasons why companies and managers [and researchers] need to think differently about people and work [as] tectonic shifts are taking place’ (Maitland & Thomson 2011, p. 3).

The themes running through the book

These themes have taken root over time, and are essentially a work in progress, building on our work in Dewe and Cooper (2012 & 2017). They represent a platform that allows us to assess and evaluate whether current research is capturing the realities of working lives. These themes also offer a balance to our work; between our ‘technical competence’ (Lefkowitz 2011, p. 114) and our moral responsibilities to those whose working lives we investigate. These themes ‘stem from the world we live in’ (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 3), challenging not just our technical competence but also our values, professional expectations and the goals we set. They also act both ‘implicitly and explicitly to consider the tools [and aspirations we have] and need, when considering the turbulence these forces of change produce’ (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 3). These themes cannot escape the shadow of the role of an applied discipline and the academic-practitioner debate, but the intention here, is to discuss them, as a means to not just prompt debate but more to offer them as a platform that provides ways to balance the complex sets of responsibilities we have, with the realities we face. These themes include context, relevance, refinement, and the role of meaning in our research.

Context

We begin by exploring the power and explanatory potential of context and its importance to our discipline particularly because of ‘the rapidly diversifying nature of work and work settings [as it] can substantially alter the underlying causal dynamics of worker-organizational relations’ (Rousseau & Fried 2001, p. 1) and ‘because we have entered a widely heralded “new age” where work organizations are undergoing profound changes’ (Gephart 2002, p. 327). In fact, this book is almost all about the dynamics of the changing context within which our research is embedded, and the need to ‘pay special attention’ to understanding the fundamental change that is rapidly consuming our ‘research settings’ because context is simply ‘designed into [our] research’ (Rousseau & Fried 2001, pp. 2; 3). We have identified a number of contexts that offer explanatory power and scope when understanding our research results and indeed reminding us that a construct’s meaning ‘changes over time’ (Rousseau & Fried 2001, p. 5), making one of our themes – ‘refinement’ – a necessary and significant tool that acknowledges the changing context and its role in making our practices and measures relevant.

We have identified four different contexts, although they simply represent just some of the apparent ‘variet[ies] of contexts OB researchers encounter’ (Rousseau & Fried 2001, p. 2), making context sufficiently important and giving it a sense of relevancy and interpretable understanding to our work. Our four levels of context simply reflect its infinite variety – the first draws attention to the implications as our (a) work becomes global and how constructs and concepts are internationalized; the second which intimately impacts on our work is the (b) changing realities of work and its future and, the third is the (c) appraisal process and the contextual meanings it provides and its explanatory potential while, the fourth is (d) methods – they too set a context and set boundaries through, at times, the traditions they impose (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 199). Research settings (context) are significantly important to all phases of the research process, helping to provide meaning to the findings (Rousseau & Fried 2001).

An expanded view of relevance

None of these themes are mutually exclusive, and each is best viewed as an essential part, which reflects a potential platform that brings together those tools ‘to understand the meaning of organizational behaviour’ (Rousseau & Fried 2001, p. 5). The second of our themes is the concept of relevance. We begin by exploring its nature and dimensions, which illustrates its significance to our discipline. A process that we have begun before when we discussed relevance as having ‘an inner side [the changing realities of work] and an outer side [working] through an “interactive process” of discovery with managers what is of important to them’ (Dewe & Cooper 2017, p. 201; Gulati 2007, p. 780). Now we expand and refine our understanding of relevance but using those, ‘two sides’ of relevance to build a three-dimensional description of its facets. The first involves (a) technical competence – ‘its scientific and theoretical underpinnings’ (Lefkowitz 2011, p. 112). The second dimension involves (b) problem solving – this involves what Corley and Gioia describe as ‘prescience’ – ‘a process of discerning what we need to know and influencing the intellectual framing of what we need to know to enlighten both academic and reflective practitioner domains’ (2011, p. 23). What Vermeulen describes as adding a ‘second loop’ ‘in generating insight practitioners find useful for understanding their own organizations and situations better before’ (2007, p. 755); and what Gulati describes as ‘boundary spanning – research focused squarely on phenomena of interest to managers’ (2007, p. 775). The final dimension involves (c) our moral and ethical responsibilities to those whose working lives we investigate. Relevance is ‘a long-standing theme’, but there is little evidence that we have ‘paid serious attention to’ it (Corley & Gioia 2011, p. 21).

But while relevance as a concept has been rather driven into the shadows by its first two dimensions (L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 Organizational psychology, organizational behaviour and workplace stress
• 2 Technology, behaviour and work stress
• 3 Stress and the future of work
• 4 Coping with work stress
• 5 The future of work stress research
• References
• Index