Organizational Culture and Stress Flashcards
(22 cards)
What is organizational culture?
Organizational culture can be thought of as the personality of a company.
What is conflict? When is the possibility of conflict enhanced?
-Conflict is a process that occurs when one person, group, or organizational subunit frustrates the goal attainment of another.
-The potential for conflict is greater when two subunits face interdependence, yet at the same time, interdependence provides a good basis for collaboration.
-The potential for conflict is also greater if two subunits face vast differences in power, status, and culture.
-Ambiguous goals, jurisdictions, or performance criteria can lead to conflict.
-When resources are scarce, power disparities between subunits are especially highlighted on display.
What are the three levels of organizational culture?
1) Artifacts: This is clearly visible above to the surface. Strong examples of this may include having a round table at a meeting symbolling equality, employees going out together for happy hour, and governments using a glass building in order to signal transparency.
2) Values: This can only be seen below the surface.
3) Basic Assumptions: This can only be seen below the surface.
What are the five key functions of a culture?
1) Define boundaries between organizations
2) Convey a sense of identity
3) Facilitate commitment to something above self-interest
4) Enhance the stability of the social system
5) Is a sense-making and control mechanism for fitting employees in the organization
What is a strong culture? What are it’s pros and cons?
-A strong culture is a culture with intense and pervasive beliefs, values, and assumptions.
-Pros of a strong culture include better coordination, conflict resolution(because shared assumptions and values help resolve conflicts more efficiently), and financial success.
-Cons of a strong culture include resistance to change, cultural clash, and pathology(what happens if a culture becomes to rigid or insular).
What are the seven key dimensions of culture?
1) Innovation
2) Stability
3) People Orientation
4) Results Orientation
5) Easygoingness
6) Attention to Detail
7) Collaborative Orientation
What are the three key contributors to culture?
1) Leaders(founders): They help to construct the initial model of beliefs, values, and assumptions. Transformational leaders do this especially well.
2) Socialization: Norms and culture are communicated to new employees, who adopt and perpetuate these.
3) Shared Experiences: Shared hsitory of encountered problems and devised solutions become habits and commonly-held assumptions.
When does culture change? How can leaders change a culture?
-Culture often changes when there is a dramatic crisis, turnover in leadership, when the company is young and small, or if the culture is considered to be a “weak culture.”
-Company leaders can change the culture by creating a threat, or an enemy which can be another company.
-Introducing new members(and particularly changes in senior management) can shift the culture.
-Culture can change when they articulate a new direction that the company is moving in.
-Shifts in the rewards and punishments being used can also help, as well as exploding old myths.
What are the top 4 workplace stressors?
1) Not doing the kind of work you want to do
2) Working too hard
3) Difficult colleagues
4) Difficult boss
What are the three steps to stress being expressed in the workplace?
1) Stressor: This is the threatening external factor
2) Emotional Stress: This is the subjective feeling that one experiences in response to the stressors, which may include feeling overwhelmed, conflicting motivations, and feeling as though one’s outcomes is beyond one’s control.
3) Stress Reactions: The reactions may include physiological stres reactions, behavioural response, and psychological consequences.
Walk me through the model of a stress episode?
-Stressors are environmental events or conditions that have the potential to induce stress.
-Stress is a psychological reaction to the demands inherent in a stressor that has the potential to make a person feel tense or anxious because the person does not feel capable of coping with these demands. Stress is not intrinsically bad.
-A stressor causes tension and anxiety when the person does not feel capable of coping with these demands.
-Stress reactions are the behavioural, psychological, and physiological consequences of stress. Some of these reactions are passive responses over which the individual has little direct control, such as elevated blood pressure or reduced immune function.
-An individual’s personality often affects an individual’s stress appraisals and stress reactions, and the most critical components of personality include locus of control, type A patterns, and negative affect.
-Anxiety reduction methods may work in the short term, but eventually the person will be stressor again.
-Someone can also have a direct confrontation with the stressor, which will have a more profound impact.
How do objectively stressful events impact a person’s life?
-Holmes and Rahe identified stressors (which may include positive or negative events), and high scorers were likely to have a serious illness in the next year.
-Stressors would weaken the person’s immune system, and then lead to illness.
What is the two step process for the appraisal of stressors?
1) Primary Appraisal: Involves perceiving an event as a threat to goals.
2) Secondary Appraisal: Concluding that one’s resources are inadequate to respond to threat (role overload), and facing extremely high stakes for poor performance (heavy responsibility), solidifies that something is indeed a stressor.
What are the three key coping mechanisms one can use when faced with stress?
1) Positive reappraisal: Focus on the good in what is happening.
2) Problem-focused coping: Thoughts and behaviours that solve underlying causes of stress.
3) Creating positive events: Creating positive time-out from stress.
How does emotional inhibition and emotional labour impact stress?
-Chronically inhibited emotion and emotional labour leads to negative health effects.
-It’s very common in service industries.
What are the key defense mechanisms for stress?
-It’s worth noting that defense mechanisms are bad for stress.
1) Rationalization: involves creating logical or socially acceptable explanations for behaviors, decisions, or feelings that might otherwise be embarrassing, disappointing, or anxiety-provoking.
2) Projecting: Attributing one’s own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or motives onto another person.
3) Displacement: Involves redirecting emotions from the original source of distress to a safer or less threatening target.
4) Reaction Formation: The process of suppressing unacceptable desires or feelings by expressing the opposite behavior or attitude.
5) Compensation: This is the subconscious process of excelling in one area to make up for perceived deficiencies to another.
What are the executive and managerial stressors? What are the operative-level stressors?
-The executive and managerial stressors are role overload, and heavy responsibility.
-Role overload occurs when one must perform too many tasks in too short a time period or work too many hours.
-Heavy responsibility often occurs when the workload has extremely important consequences for the organization and its members.
-Operative-level stressors are more faced by those who occupy non-professional and non-managerial positions in organizations.
-Operative-level stressors includepoor physical working conditions, and poor job design.
-Poor physical working conditions include physically unpleasant or even dangerous working conditions.
-Poor job design can provoke stress at any organizational level, but lower level blue collar and white collar jobs face it more.
-Paradoxically, jobs that are too simple can act as stressors.
What are five key ways that we can cope with stress?
1) Breathe
2) Don’t catastrophize
3) Turn off or don’t look at the thing causing you stress
4) Take stock of what is causing stress
5) Set goals
How does having multiple roles affect stress?
-Role quality: How rewarding, meaningful, or manageable a role is plays a crucial part in determining whether multiple roles are beneficial or stressful.
-Number of Roles: Having more roles doesn’t increase stress, unless the number of roles exceeds an individual’s coping capacity, or when roles are in conflict.
-Time Demands of Roles: This is a key stressor.
-Work Family Balance: Achieving a healthy work-family balance is associated with increased well-being, better health, and stronger relationships. However, difficulties may arise such as dissatisfaction, spill-over(stress experienced in one role such as work spilling over into another domain such as family), and withdrawal.
Walk me through the burnout-engagement continuum?
-Burnout is characterized by three key dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism, and low self-efficacy. These dimensions develop sequentially as exhaustion leads to cynicism, which can lead to low self-efficacy.
-Engagement is characterized by another three key dimensions: vigour, dedication, and absorption. Vigour refers to high levels of energy, mental resilience, and persistence. Dedication represents a sense of inspiration, pride, and challenge in one’s work. And absorption is the counterpart to low self-efficacy, as absorption is being fully concentrated and happily engrosses in work, often losing track of time due to deep involvement.
What are the four key workplace outcomes of stress?
1) Reduced job performance(especially relevant for high complexity jobs)
2) Counterproductive work behaviours
3) Withdrawal behaviours: Includes lateness, absenteeism, and turnover.
4) Illness: Leads to higher healthcare costs.
What are the key interventions that can be made?
1) Social support: Includes support groups and company events
2) Material support: Includes daycare centres and relocation services
3) Flexibility: Includes family leave policies, and flex-time/telecommuting
