In this chapter, we highlighted work-related stressors such as harassment and incivility, workload, and lack of task control. Of course, there are many non-work-related stressors that increasingly come into the discussion. Please discuss these and discuss their impact on the work environment.


The impact of non-work-related stresses are significant. We believe organizations now engage in more “wellness-related” programs to deal with such stressors on a daily basis. For example, the care giving to an infant or a senior parent is now part and parcel of wellness programs across the globe. We know that care giving takes its toll on care givers, in terms of diseases, psychological consequences, accidents, aggressive behaviors and job burnout. The second author on the book noticed that in her consulting work with GE, that one of the business units had a “bet on” to see who would “stroke out first” due to the stress of the job. That was not a joke, indeed it was due to work overload.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is it possible to have a knowledge of what an organizational culture is before you become a part of the organization? How important is it for you to align yourself with your organizational culture?

Organizational culture is artifacts and shared values and assumptions. Artifacts may be observable before you become a part of the organization but the shared organizational values and assumptions are the intangibles and difficult to decipher before you become a part of it. It is important to align with the organizational culture because it represents the way things work in the organization. Organizational culture acts as the control system, the social glue and sense making. Any violation of what is shared by members of an organization is likely to create alienation for a new member.
Read more

“All decisions are ethical decisions.” Comment on this statement, particularly by referring to the concepts of moral intensity and moral sensitivity.

This sweeping statement is false. In other words, not all decisions are having equal right/wrong or good/bad dimensions. We are saying there is a threshold which defines ethical concern, and it is a function of moral intensity and moral sensitivity. For a decision to have an ethical dimension, i t has to have some moral intensity associated with it. Moral intensity is a characteristic of the situation. It refers to the degree to which an issue demands the application of ethical principles. “Who should be laid off?” would have high moral intensity. On the other hand, a decision to take an umbrella to work because it might rain has no moral intensity. This is because morally intense issues involve others in the society who may think the decision is good or evil, or the issue quickly affects people. Moral sensitivity refers to a characteristic of the decision maker, not the situation. Faced with the same issue, two decision makers may be more or less moral sensitive, depending on emp...
Read more

A 16-year-old hired as an office administrator at a small import services company started posting her thoughts about the job on her Facebook site. After her first day, she wrote: “first day at work. omg!! So dull!!” Two days later, she complained “all i do is shred holepunch n scan paper!!! omg!” Two weeks later she added “im so totally bord!!!” These comments were intermixed with the other usual banter about her life. Her Facebook site did not mention the name of the company where she worked. Three weeks after being hired, the employee was called into the owner’s office, where he fired her for the comments on Facebook and then had her escorted from the building. The owner argues that these comments put the company in a bad light, and her “display of disrespect and dissatisfaction undermined the relationship and made it untenable.” Discuss this scenario from the perspective of the owner and the worker.

This case occurred at a small industrial services business in the United Kingdom (see: A. Levy, “Teenage office worker sacked for moaning on Facebook about her 'totally boring' job,” Daily Mail, 26 February 2009). However, there are several similar cases involving Facebook, blogs, and other social media, where employees write negative comments about their employer. For example, this incident parallels two earlier cases in which (a) a Starbucks employee was fired for complaining about his boss’s decision on a work issue and (b) an employee who worked in marketing for government in northern Canada was fired for posting artistic photos of garbage in the snow. To some people, the case of the teenage Facebook complainer is a clear case of an employee who should be dismissed because she lacks sufficient commitment to and appreciation of the job. The company owner later explained to medi a : “We were looking for a long-term relationship with Miss Swann as we do with all our staf f ....
Read more