Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Preventive Stress Management

In the last byte, we looked at counterdependence and overdependence as strain factors. This completed the discussion on how individuals are different from each other in their behavior to stress and strain. In today's byte, we begin looking at Preventive Stress Management.

Stress as we know is all prevalent - it doesn’t just feature at work but also in personal life. Though typically confused with distress, stress itself is neither inherently bad nor destructive. It is something that can be managed and Preventive Stress Management (PSM) is one of the ways we can do that in an organization. Preventive Stress Management is an organizational philosophy that holds that people and organizations should take joint responsibility for promoting health and preventing distress and strain. There are essentially three stages of prevention - they are:
  • Primary: This stage in PSM is designed to reduce, modify, or eliminate the demand or stressor causing stress
  • Secondary: This stage in PSM is designed to alter or modify the individual's or the organization's response to a demand or stress
  • Tertiary: This stage in PSM is designed to heal individual or organizational symptoms of distress and strain.
We shall discuss these three stages of prevention in the context of organizational prevention, individual prevention in the next few bytes.

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