Is Stress the Same for Managers and Employees?

Statistics Canada has reported that about 1/3 of women and 29% of men reported feeling extremely stressed most days at work.

According to an article by Joe Castado in Canadian Business, in July 2008, COMPAS Inc. polled 116 leaders of Canadian business about what stresses them out.

The survey revealed that for the CEO's the top stressor was meeting revenue targets, followed by staffing concerns and the need to keep costs down.

The survey also found that the workplace was a greater source of headaches for CEO's than issues related to families or personal finance.

The CEO's were also asked about the most stressful events of their careers. Most responses had to do with their employees--issues such as firings, incompetence, company revenues, or angry shareholders.

What about employee stress? The 2008 Global Strategic Rewards Survey conducted by Watson Wyatt Worldwide found workplace stress is one of the top reasons employees say they leave organizations.  However, stress is not one of the top five reasons employers state as causing employee resignations.

Based on the survey’s results, employees stated that the day-to-day challenges related to their jobs caused them the most stress, in particular the expectation to do so much in so little time.

Here’s what employees mentioned as the most frequent causes of stress:

•Job definition — Unclear or unrealistic performance expectations cause stress, along with unrealistic workloads, inadequate training and poorly defined work processes.

•Work group environment — A lack of teamwork and/or a lack of staff to perform their job duties create workplace stress.

•Supervisor — Employees were split about how supervisors contribute to work-place stress. Low performers said their supervisor was a cause of workplace stress whereas top performers more frequently cited poorly defined work processes, not their supervisor, as a reason for stress.

The Gallup organization found employees often left their job because of the relationship they had with their boss, and not the job itself.

So it seems there are different sources of stress for managers and employees, which in turn causes differing perceptions about performance and satisfaction in the workplace.

Read more here

Posted by: suhujitha on 2009-07-31 17:03:25

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