Organizational Communication and Stress

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes the role and importance of organizational communication in managing stress at workplace in the current global business environment, which is often plagued by uncertainty, excessive competition, and pressure on profitability. Stress in its negative form has unlimited potential to cause long-term ill-effects to the organization in a variety of ways. If left unchecked, stress can cause losses in productivity, decline in employee performance, and health hazards in employees. This is an unwarranted cost to the organization, especially in today's environment, which is driven by the concept of lean management and cost reduction. Organizations are naturally keen to ensure that stressful forces are eliminated from the workplace to rule out potential costs on this count. The paper discusses the impact of stress on the psychological well-being and health of employees, highlighting the different health risks, such as depression, anxiety, alcoholism etc., that employees are likely to encounter in the course of their work. To support this view, the paper provides indications of costs and consequences of stress-related health problems, including fatal consequences, which the organizations can do well without. Impact of stress factors on the performance of employees and the major areas in workplace that can be subject to negative stress are discussed. The role of personal communication at the workplace to remove the stress-causing factors is highlighted. The paper recognizes the reality that stress is integral to human life and, in fact, drives performance within limits. It is only the negative side of stress that is detrimental to the individual and the organization and has to be eliminated or controlled. It is recommended that organizations implement stress management strategies to enable employees cope up with stress; for such efforts to be successful, the key requirement is effective organizational communication.

From the Paper:

"Stress at the work place is one of the most widely discussed topics today. The challenges of globalization of business, increased competition, advancing technology that result in job losses and the compulsion to perform are some of the macro-level reasons that contribute to stress among employees. Organizations suffer from the impact of stress in terms of absenteeism, higher employee turnover, poor quality and situations of conflict at the work place. In effect, stress adversely affects the overall performance of the organization. The origin of the term stress is the Latin word stringer, which means "to draw tight." The meaning of stress can be best understood from the basic concepts of physics and engineering. Stress arises when external or environmental forces of certain magnitude impact an object; the forces result in strain on the object and this may lead to either temporary or permanent distortion of the object, depending on the extent of force applied. In respect of humans, a situation that is likely to be threatening, ambiguous or burdensome is likely to induce stress. From a psychological perspective, stress is the difference between the demands placed upon the individual and the individual's ability to cope with these. (Ivancevich and Matteson, 32). The individual must experience the demand as excessive for the occurrence of stress. This leads to the inference that different people find different things stressful; what is stressful for one person may not be for another. For instance, one person may fear retirement from work, whereas another person of the same age may actually be looking forward to a retired lifestyle."

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