In a study done on stress in the workplace and how it affect our productivity the outcomes was interesting. It seems to be that merely having the ability to control the source of ones stress is beneficial in coping with the situation. A study broke people up into two groups. Both groups had to write/journal about anything the desired. In the middle of the writing there would be a big annoying sound that started to interrupt their thought. One group was told that if the large noise came they could not make it stop. The other group was told that when the large noise happens they had a choice to stop the distraction. Interestingly enough, those individuals who were not able to control the situation showed a lack of emotion in their writing. They had not excitability, creativity or motive to write at all. Whereas the group which could stop the disruptive sound had an increased amount of emotion, creativity, and motive in their writing AND not one of the people in that group asked someone to stop the disruptive noise (Even though they had the CONTROL to do so). Therefore, it appears that its not the disruptive aspects of our lives that are stressing us out, it's the uncontrollable disruptive aspects of our life that produce the most stress to individuals.
I found this to be very interesting. Just having the ability to control a situation, even if you don’t emit the behavior to control it, you will have less stress and are better at ease at your task at hand. As the article stated that stress is often seen as an inevitable part of the work life, but it can also have sever health consequences. If you were able to decrease the number of health related problems due to stress just by giving people the idea that they had some control over their environment. I would like to see the figures on the amount of money that would be saved.
Another article I found while searching the topic happened to be from the same site, and it explained more of the cost of stress.
http://www.humannatureatwork.com/Workplace-Stress-1.htm
I find this very interesting as I am starting a full time job after graduation. I will be in a management position, something I have never done before and I am starting to stress out just thinking about it. But I found this site that explains way to cope with and reduce stress levels. http://www.ivillage.co.uk/health/hlive/stress/articles/0,,181034_546571,00.html
Stress is a huge factor to consider in every position of employment and can have a significant impact on productivity and overall job satisfaction. Minimizing work environment stress can hugely benefit an organization in terms of individual and overall productivity.
Another significant factor to consider when discussing work-related stress is the amount of autonomy an individual has at work. In this study, autonomy was given to one group and not the other. This study measured productivity by determining whether the employee's journal entries were creative. As shown above, those individuals who had the option of controlling the impetus noise (those with autonomy) were better able to create more masterful pieces of work. Their writings were shown to be more creative and also included more emotional cognitive processes. The lack of control of the other journal group (those with no autonomy) resulted in producing less creative writings that contained low levels of emotion.
Although often overlooked in the workplace, it is imperative to consider the multitude of factors that encourage and discourage productivity. Determining how these factors effect worker productivity can mean the difference between a business lasting a month to a business lasting through multiple generations.