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Would you like your employees to have a stress management coach available 24 hours/7 days a week to help them reduce burnout, increase productivity, improve morale, improve health, lower stress-related insurance costs, and reduce stress-related turnover costs. Here is some research on why learning to reduce employee is so important.
Research on the Effects of Stress on Performance
Under conditions of stress:
- Task completion time may be increased and accuracy reduced by stress (Idzikowski and Baddeley, 1983; McLeod, 1977).
- Individuals lose their ability to analyze complicated situations and manipulate information (Larsson, G, February 1987).
- Individuals suffer from performance rigidity or narrow thinking (Friedman and Mann, 1993; Keinan, 1987)
- Communication effectiveness may also be reduced (Driskell, Carson, and Moskal, 1988).
- Research findings suggest that when an individual comes under
stress, his cognitive performance and decisionmaking may be adversely
affected.
- Stress can also lead to “groupthink,” in which members of the group ignore important cues, force all members to adhere to a consensus decision — even an incorrect one — and rationalize poor decisions (Janis and Mann, 1977).
- Extended exposure to stress can have severe negative consequences on non-task performance dimensions. For example, high levels of stress can lead to emotional exhaustion, lower organizational commitment, and increased turnover intentions (Cropanzano, Rapp, and Bryne, 2003).
- Individual and group performance, decisionmaking processes, and perception are all affected by stressors. Jamal (1985) argues that stress at any level reduces task performance by draining an individual’s energy, concentration, and time. Vroom (1964) offers a similar explanation, suggesting that physiological responses caused by stressors impair performance.
- Stress can affect an individual’s decisionmaking process and ability to make effective judgments. Decision making models proposed by Janis and Mann (1977) support this hypothesis and suggest that under stress, individuals may make decisions based on incomplete information.
- Friedman and Mann (1993) suggest that when under conditions of stress, individuals may fail to consider the full range of alternatives available, ignore long-term consequences, and make decisions based on oversimplifying assumptions.
- Furthermore, the work of Staw, Sandelands, and Dutton (1981) suggests that individuals may suffer from performance rigidity as a result of their reduced search behavior and reliance on fewer perceptual cues to make decisions. Research on decision making under stress supports these theoretical models.
- Wallsten (1980) observes the decision making processes of individuals under time pressure. He finds that individuals under time pressure tend to focus their attention only on a few salient cues.
- Stress can also contribute to performance decrements by slowing cognition and individual information processing. For example, Idzikowski and Baddeley (1983) find that the time to complete a given task doubled with the introduction of an external stressor.
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