The challenges of managing the changing nature of workplace stress
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/17465729200600027 |
| Published date | 01 December 2006 |
| Pages | 6-9 |
| Date | 01 December 2006 |
| Author | Cary Cooper |
| Subject Matter | Health & social care |
The challenges of managing
the changing nature of
workplace stress
Cary L Cooper,CBE
Professor of
organizational
psychology and health
Lancaster University
Management School
Correspondence to:
Cary L Cooper,CBE
Professor of
organizational
psychology and health
Lancaster University
Management School
Lancaster University
LA1 4YX
c.cooper1@
lancaster.ac.uk
GUEST EDITORIAL
6journal of public mental health
vol 5 • issue 4
The enterprise culture of the 1980s and
the ‘flexible workforce’ of the 1990s
and early 2000s have helped to
transform the UK economy and other
countries in Europe. But, as we were to
discover, by the end of these decades there was a
substantial personal cost for many individual
employees. This cost was captured by a single word
–stress. Indeed, stress has found as firm a place in
our modern lexicon as texting, BlackBerrys and Big
Brother. Weuse the term casually to describe a wide
range of aches and pains resulting from our hectic
pace of work and domestic life. ‘I feel really stressed,’
someone says to describe a vague yet often acute
sense of disquiet. ‘She’s under a lot of stress,’ we say
when trying to understand a colleague’s irritability
or forgetfulness. ‘It’sahigh-stress job,’ someone says,
awarding an odd sort of prestige to his or her
occupation. But to those whose ability to cope with
day-to-day matters is at crisis point, the concept of
stress is no longer a casual one; for them, stress can
be a four-letter word – pain (Cooper, 2005).
The cost of stress
These excessive pressures in the workplace have
been very costly to business. For example, the
collective cost of stress to US organisations has been
estimated at approximately $150 billion a year
(Karasek & Theorell, 1990; European Foundation
for the Improvement of Living and Working
Conditions, 1996). In the UK, stress has been
estimated to cost the economy between five and 10
per cent of GNP per annum (Cooper, 2005). In
2002, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development in the UK (the professional
association of human resources professionals) found
that workplace stress accounted for more long-term
sickness absence in the UK economy than any other
cause. If some of the other stress-related categories
are added (poor workplace morale, impact of long
hours, personal problems), it is the most significant
bottom line cost to UK plc. The same costs have
been found in many other European countries,
particularly in countries undergoing major
economic structural change (Lennart & Lunde-
Jensen, 1996; Kompier & Cooper, 1999).
Since the industrial revolution, each decade has
tended to have defining socio-economic
characteristics: innovation and challenging the
established norms of society in 1960s; industrial strife
and conflict between employer and employee in the
1970s; the ‘enterprise culture’, with its strategic
alliances, privatisations and the like, in the 1980s,
and the short-term contract culture, with its
outsourcing and downsizing and long working hours
culture, in the 1990s and early 2000s. Weare seeing
Americanisation spreading throughout Europe. This
trend towards what is euphemistically called the
‘flexible’ workforce originated in the UK. Britain led
the way in Europe towards privatising the public
sector in the 1980s. Its workforce was substantially
downsized during the recession of the late 1980s and
early 1990s. Outsourcing many of its corporate
functions, it left the recession behind in the early
1990s, faster than its European counterparts.
However, this scenario of ‘leaner’ organisations,
intrinsic job insecurity and a culture of longer
working hours is beginning to have an adverse effect
on employee attitudes and behaviour.
Amajor quality of working life survey of a
cohort of 5000 British managers conducted by the
Institute of Management (now the Chartered
Management Institute) from 1997 to 2001 (Worrall
&Cooper, 2001) found that these changes –
downsizing, outsourcing, de-layering (the reduction
of levels in an organisation) and the like – led to
substantially increased job insecurity,lowered
morale and, most important of all, the erosion of
motivation and loyalty. These changes were
perceived to have led to an increase in profitability
and productivity, but decision-making was slower
and the organisation was shown to have lost the
right mix of human resource skills and experience
in the process.
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