Stress: Distress in an Organizational Context

In the last byte, we looked at the affects of individual distress. In today's byte, we look at the context and affects of organizational distress.

It could be identified that if stress is mismanaged there are a lot of indirect costs that come up like - low morale, dissatisfaction, breakdown in communication, disruption in working relationships etc. We could broadly classify the costs into 3 heads:

1. Participation Problems
2. Performance Decrement
3. Compensation Award

Participation Problems are cost associated with absenteeism, tardiness, strikes and work stoppages, and turnover. Personnel Costs, Replacement Costs, are some of the overheads that an organization would require to take on in this case.

Performance Decrement is costs resulting from poor quality or low quality of production, grievance and unscheduled machine down time and repair.

Compensation Award is an organization cost resulting from court awards for job stress. This is an increasing trend in the US

Thus we see that there is an increasing cost on the organization due to the various distress issues that are encountered in work place.