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Discouraged Workers

Sustainability has moved to the forefront of corporate thinking as the implications of human, environmental, and economic strain and depletion become apparent. Disengagement, discouragement, and disenfranchisement among workers are growing concerns. The Bureau of Labor Statistics technically defines discouraged workers as individuals who have discontinued their job search because they have been unable to find employment; they become discouraged and drop out of the labor market. However, the problem of discouragement is a much larger social-psychological issue. Disengagement appears to stem from work overload, or a misalignment between organizational and personal values as embodied within and communicated through the organizational culture. As an individual's psychological and physical resources are overwhelmed, depression, memory loss, poor attention, and anger are common. Sustained stress often leads to cynicism, inefficiency, and exhaustion, which can result in lost workdays, lower employee productivity, and high job turnover rates. Workplace-related stress disorders and psychiatric morbidity have increased over the past 30 years. In Canada, accepted claims for stress disorders cost $4.7 million per year, excluding health care and rehabilitation costs, and approximately 20 percent of the payroll of a typical company supports stress-related problems like absenteeism, employee turnover, disability leaves, counseling, medicine, and accidents. In 2001, approximately half of short-term and long-term disability claims were for mental and nervous disorders—an increase from 30 percent of disability claims in 1990 and 15 percent in 1980. The human and organizational implications of increasingly stressful workplaces include risks to health, reduced productivity, and lack of personal, financial, and social sustainability. Inability to cope or adapt to stressful conditions results in poor performance and has repercussions for the health as well as the long-term stability and sustainability of the organization. Qualitative findings were summarized into five broad themes: organizational culture and function, control, lack of resources, responsibility for people, and the rate and pace of change.

Resiliency and Coping Strategies

Current strategies in the field of organizational development designed to address the disengagement resulting from increase in workload and complexity include the concepts of resilience, stress management, and stress-related growth. Resiliency refers to an individual's capacity to endure or tolerate stress. Coping most often refers to avoiding or reducing the stressor (e.g., confrontational thinking, distancing, escape/avoidance, thinking/regret, blaming others, or acceptance/resignation). Problem-focused coping refers to changing or growing as a person in a positive way, or coming out of the experience better than when one went in. R. S. Lazarus and S. Folkman's Stress, Appraisal, and Coping (1984) includes several subscales of emotion and problem-focused strategies for coping with stress. Similarly, W. D. Gentry and S. C. Kobasa suggest that resilient individuals have personal characteristics that help them better tolerate stress by means of personal emotional and problem-focused strategies.

Some short-term coping strategies, such as presenteeism—working while ill or working harder—actually increase the costs of stress. In their study of mental health and work performance, F. W. Bond and D. Bunce found that “people who do not try to avoid or control psychological events have more attentional resources, engage in less avoidant behavior, and may learn how they can most effectively use the control that they have to promote their mental health.” H. Selye's conceptualization of “eustress,” a positive reinterpretation of stress, suggests that perception plays a significant role in the manifestation of stress and offers a leverage point for transforming the stress response. Interpretation or appraisal of a stressor situation has been shown to influence a variety of problem-solving skills and processes, including cue utilization, breadth of attention, information processing, and problem construction. To thrive and engage in stressful environments, workers need the capacity to problem-solve stressors in more sustainable ways, effectively transforming the perception or frame of the stressor into an opportunity for sustainable growth.

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