 Welcome to the second clip of chapter 8. We were talking about decent work. And in this clip I will talk about one of the main theories that inform the dimensions of decent work. And those are theories about stress. So after this clip you will understand the following. I will start with a definition of stress. And then I will tell about stress theories. In particular when strain leads to stress and when stress becomes unhealthy and problematic. I will also explain how psychological and social and behavioral processes interact with physical and biological stress reactions. And I will end with the HRM perspective and tell you what can be done to prevent the negative consequences of continuous stress. So in the literature stress is a pattern of physiological, emotional and behavioral reactions occurring in situations where individuals perceive threats to their importance which they may not be able to meet. We distinguish two types of stress, acute stress and chronic stress. In essence stress is a healthy reaction. Imagine a situation where you have to do a presentation for an audience that you don't know yet. It might be a stressful situation. It may raise your awareness that you are doing something that is really exciting, makes you a bit tense. On that moment your body helps you to perform well. You will be very alert. Your stress hormones will produce, for example, adrenaline which will help you to be a top performer on that moment. However, it can also be that the stressor is problematic. For example, this is the case when the stressor is there to stay. In a normal situation the stressor comes and goes. In the example of doing an exciting presentation, the stressor will go after the presentation is done. Then the body has time to sit back and to relax and to bring all the activated system back to the desired rest state. Sometimes the stressor is there and it's really difficult to detach from it. Imagine young working parents with young children. They have to be alert all the time. They have to perform at work and they have to look after the kids. This can be a problematic stage. It can bring some risks if there is no time to recover from a stressor. I'm going to explain this using a model and building on the biological and further psychological and behavioral responses that happen after a stressor is there to stay. Let's first have a look at the basics. Stress happens once there is a mismatch between a situation that is perceived as threatening to a person. When a person feels that they are not immediately sure how to act or react to the situation. A stressor might be like the presentation. It may be something they didn't do before and therefore causes a feeling of stress. For somebody who did presentations like a thousand times, the same situation can be completely stress-free or maybe a little bit tense because it's exciting all the time but it's not a stressor as such. The perceptions, individual interpretations about the situation will determine whether somebody finds themselves capable of dealing with the situation or not. And when finds oneself of incapable or not well suited to deal with the situation then all kind of responses happen both in the body psychologically and socially. For example, within the body, the body will start producing hormones to try and restore this feeling of stress to be able to deal with it. Already mentioned adrenaline but also cortisol. All these hormones in your body help you to perform well in stressful situations and they are useful. They are important but they are not endless. So biological hormones, they can be depleted. So in situations where stressor is there to stay, you can in the end feel exhausted and I'll demonstrate that in a few slides later. Also there are a lot of psychological processes happening. So what makes the situation fearful for some and not for others? And when it's a fearful situation, how do you cope with that? How do you deal with that? So which emotions are there and how do these emotions again reinforce or just help how to deal with the situation? And finally, stress will also exist in social responses. For example, your behavior towards others might change. You may have a more nearby focus on things that are immediately important and then you can't oversee all the other things that also need to happen. So stress has a lot of consequences, a lot of responses in different levels. So I'm going to focus on chronic stress. So remember acute stress is a healthy situation. You will just be able to cope with it. Stress hormones and the psychological and the behavioral responses in the end all are aimed at taking the stressor away, dealing with it and then afterwards you can relax. However, stress is no longer a healthy response when once a stressor reaches a chronic state. That means that you have to be continuously alert, you have to be continuously on so to speak in order to deal with the stressor. If that starts to happen, your biological system may become depleted of hormones that you need to be able to deal with that effectively. So let's turn to a model that illustrates how the body responds to stress levels and we start with the situation where there is homeostasis. There are no stressors, nothing happens and you're just your nice relaxed self. You sit back relaxed and everything goes smooth. Then something happens. There is a stressor and the alarm bell in your body goes off and then the body starts responding in different ways. So you start to think about the situation and that triggers all the biological processes in your body to help you be alert and to deal with the system. So immediately after the perception of the situation as a threat, your body starts producing hormones that help you to be in a very alert and active mode. And that will help you to deal with the situation, to help you make the situation go away and to go back to the homeostasis that your body likes to be in. And this process we call an alleostasis. So this is the desire, the physiological reaction that helps the body to be alert, to deal with the stressor and to try and come back to the desired status of equilibrium. If there is acute stress, this works. So you are more alert, you are very tense, but being in this state will help you deal with the stressor and then you can push it away and move back into this desired state of homeostasis where all the systems are in balance and you feel good. However, like that when the stressor is there to stay, you're starting to deplete your biological resources. You're starting to feel tired, you're starting to feel tense, it might affect your sleep. At this point, in the early phases of towards exhaustion, people still feel good, relatively good. They feel tired, but at the top of their being. So this is typical for young people starting in their careers. There's a lot of things happening, everything is exciting and although they feel tired, they just continue because it is important. And we have to do, and I've never felt so good, but I'm trying to start also a little bit tired and starting to give up some things that I do normally in my free time. So the system, biologically, but also the other resources that you use in life, they start to deplete. If this then continues to go at some point, the systems are becoming exhausted. The resources are starting to dry up and that shows in a lot of biological symptoms. So for example, you will have difficulty sleeping. This is a very important first signal. Also, you feel like you have no appetite for sex, for example. So all these are biological indicators that something is wrong in your stress hormone management. If then the stressor still goes on, still not goes away, then a moment comes where you start to feel exhausted. You start to feel that you're unable, incapable to cope with all the demanding tasks that are at hand. You are out of energy. There is a point we know from people that are moving towards a burnout, that there is a moment where they feel complete panic. I can't cope with this demanding situation anymore. Literally, the body doesn't cooperate anymore. There's no energy left to deal with all the tasks that I have at hand. And then finally, this results in the ultimate phase of exhaustion that we know as a burnout. So a burnout is not just a psychological thing. It's literally a biological reaction to a prolonged period of extreme levels of stress. A burnout is changing something in your hormone system and in your brains as well. It has shown that people that have had a burnout, they have scars in their brains. It takes a long time for people who are actually in a burnout to recover. It can take months or years. And even people who are once in a burnout, they may stay as perceptible to future periods of exhaustion. So it's in the individual's interest to prevent that they reach a state of burnout. So to summarize this chronic stress and what it does to the biological systems, preferred state, this is homeostasis. Stress is a healthy reaction. Allostasis will help you to deal with the situation. However, when the stress is there to stay, your resources in your body, your stress hormones will deplete and they will cause problems, physiological problems in your body. Lack of sleep, lack of appetite, lack of appetite for sex as well, and eventually can lead to a complete burnout. And like said, this is a state that you don't want to be in. I think throughout this story I mentioned a few occasions where I say okay, it's your individual situation, it's your individual reaction to it. So it's not just your body that does things. Also psychological and social processes interfere with the development of a burnout and the dealing with stress. So I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into the cognitions and the social consequences of prolonged periods of stress. So we dealt with the first one, the biological response. It is the hormonal system that activates the awareness and the dealing with stress, but in the end if it's on for a too long period it will have negative consequences for health. Next to that, a parallel process that interacts closely with the biological responses is the sense-making of individuals. So the cognitive responses of individuals who make sense of a situation. I already said that for some people doing a presentation to a new group of people is not a stressor at all, but for others it might be really, it may cause real anxiety to be in front of strangers and to do a presentation. So individual differences in experience, but also in your personality, they may interfere with how you interpret the situation and how you are able to deal with that situation. And the moment a person interprets the situation as threatening as something that they are not completely able of dealing with, then that activates the biological system as well. So Lazarus was the person who said that people react in a psychological way on stressors, and this leads to feeling tired and depressed. The third pillar is the behavioral responses, and now we turn to a researcher called Hopful, and he said that stress is not only by situations that cause stress, but it can also be caused by things that you lose in your social environment that are important to you. So things that you have in your, the resources you have in your personal life that bring you a good life, they are important for your home your stasis, this is the level that you want to have. The moment something changes in your social homeostasis, stress reactions will be activated. And he pointed out, especially for example, situations where people lose their jobs are important situations that cause stress. And not only because it makes them worry and psychologically react, but also because it influences their behaviors. If somebody loses their job that affects how one can live, then the most natural reaction is trying to keep what you have. So make sure that you can pay the rent of your house, that you can buy food. So what happens is that the moment somebody loses a resource that is important to them, they will narrow their set of behaviors to maintain what they already have. So they will not invest any longer in things that are not immediately important such as an evening out with friends, or spending time to do an additional dedication. No, Hopful said that he noticed in people that have experienced loss in important resources, he sees a narrowing effect. And in a way, in the way they behave, they come in a vicious circle that one loss leads to another. So loss of a job can lead to loss of friends, can lead to loss of social feeling well, and then be a stressor in itself. So social situation leads to behavioral responses and an effort to maintain the resources to keep up with the life that you had while giving up other resources which will in turn lead to a spiral of loss. You lose one thing, you lose the next, you lose the next, which will kind of encourage or speed up the stress process and eventually also the psychological and physical well-being. So one example we came across when we were doing research in labour migrants in Dutch warehouses, we interviewed workers from Hungary and asking them, okay, how did you end up in work that is typically characterised by long hours, insecurity, uncertain living conditions, so basically precarious work conditions. And the quote that you can read here is that a spiral of loss for one of the respondents led to the situation that he ended up working in this warehouse and he felt that there was no way out of it anymore. So he had lost his parents, had debts, which made him go to Western Europe because the wages are higher there in the hope that he would build and save up for future steps. However, just surviving in a new country where you don't know anything, living on premises far away from a village made the situation even worse so he felt really stressed and towards a burnout. So this brings us to stresses at work. So what kind of sources for stress exist in the workplace and these give hints to where we as human research management can act. For research we know that stresses lie in three domains of work. First of all, the task itself can be very demanding, it can be just too much, too many tasks, too difficult, or it can be very unclear what is expected from you. All of these situations we know are stressful conditions. Social demands, think about conflicts with your superior, feeling excluded, discrimination. So all of these things in the social context of work can lead to a stressful situation. And finally, underestimated but really, really important if people feel physically threatened at work, for example by unsafe working conditions, this can again lead to stress. So this brings us to the question, how can you prevent stress? How can you manage it? Well, it's important to recognize that there are individual differences. The differences in personal situations can lead to a very different interpretation whether a situation is a threat or not. So for example differences in private situations, families, do you have to look after others? Maybe in your spare time it can also, you know, the combination of work and life can be demanding. Your own health, differences in personality, experienced knowledge already mentioned those. And for example differences in being prepared to be able to deal with stress. So things like training, coaching, customization of work, these are all things that can help individuals to adjust the work to the situation that they can manage. In general you can think about work design practices for human resource management. For example, giving people decision latitude about how they can do their job, making sure that people feel empowered, that they feel that they can do this, that they know what to do and make sure that they are fairly rewarded for what they do. Also think about social support by colleagues, think about anti-discrimination policies, think about inclusion climate, think about making sure that people work in a safe environment and try to combat extremely long working hours. So wrapping up, now you know that stress is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. That there are different processes simultaneously happening that makes that stress has negative consequences for individuals. Think about the biological process, the cognitive process and the social and behavioral process. And for human resource management you need to combat stress at the level of the job itself but also reckon that there are individual circumstances and preferences that you need to take into account. So keeping in touch with your employees, talking, communication are key to understand what people need and to act upon that. Thank you.