Stress Problems

As long as integrity prevails, we are able and willing to do the work that we have to do. However, things may happen that interfere with our integrity. These may be factors in our working tasks, in our work environment and in ourselves. As a result, it becomes difficult or even impossible to do our work. This may be a matter of not being able to attend to our work, of not willing to attend to it, or both. If we still have to do our work, this implies that we lose control over our own functioning. This may be the start of a stress process.
Stress begins at the moment that we must do something that we are not able and/or willing to do. This implies a serious loss of control, which our mammalian brain interprets as a threat to our existence. It responds by activating a biological process that we share with all other vertebrates. This, however, is only appropriate in situations that quickly demand intensive bodily action. Seen from a biological perspective, this is primarily about life and death situations. In situations of a different kind, such as at our work site, this process is less appropriate and can activate a lengthy vicious cycle. This negatively affects our effectiveness, motivation and creativity, isolates us and violates our well-being and health.
Though stress has gradually become something like a modern manifestation of evil in general, it may have a positive value too. At the level of our own life, we can interpret being troubled by stress problems as a signal that we apparently have to do something that we are not able and/or do not want to do. Some form of (self-) examination and some study of the environment may then help us to find out what exactly is going on and what we can do about it. What matters here is that we can use our own complaints as a signal that we have to change something, either in our environment or in ourselves. In this way, recognition of stress reactions can offer us an entrance to personal development and growth. This process fits in well with emotional functioning in general:
like and dislike, pleasantness and unpleasantness . . . are expressions of match and mismatch with sensitivities and set-points, embedded in behavior systems. They are, in principle, useful signals, for learning what situations to seek or avoid in the future and, more directly, for beginning or pursuing a given course of action, for terminating action or changing tacks.
The same idea of stress as a signal can be applied to an organisational context as well. Here too, such complaints can have an important signalling function. Work stress for instance is evoked foremost when employees find it impossible to keep their attention to their work sufficiently, because they are unable and/or unwilling to do so. So, many stress complaints at a clearly described spot in the organisation make clear that it is difficult there, or even downright impossible, to focus attention on the work at hand in a self-evident way. Apparently, something is the matter there, and probably something that has more undesired effects than just the individual stress complaints. As such, it may indicate that the present adaptation of the organisation to the environment is troublesome. When we speak of a clearly described spot, we can think for instance of a certain department, job, group of jobs or a certain floor.
So mapping stress complaints with the help of interviews and surveys can be used as a technique to trace bottlenecks, other systemic errors in the organisation and possible solutions and improvements. In this way, we make it possible to learn something about the systemic causes and other coinciding problems as well. This then may enable us to solve not only the individual complaints, but also to make structural improvements at the level of these causes. This opens up possibilities for a better adaptation to the outside world in general also.
The general objective of such interventions is to enable the employees involved to keep their attention on the work in a self-evident and pleasurable way. In realising this objective, the most important guidelines are challenging the organisation and its employees to strive in their work for:
more creativity, as well as more personal and professional development of those involved; better relationships and a better social climate; more work pleasure and higher motivation; greater effectiveness and better production quality.