Incest 0000i-xiv FM 1 - William L. White

Role Conditi0ns and the Worker Casualty Process 167
of feedback do we provide the manager in a declining industry where
even the best management practices may show year-end losses rather
than profits? What kind of feedback do we provide the physician and
nurses caring for a terminally ill patient? What kind of feedback do we
provide the rescue workers who are called to the horror of a plane crash
in which all of the passengers are dead? In such situations, when effective
mechanisms of social/emotional support and feedback are not present,
highly competent and caring workers can become casualties of
professional distress.
10.8 Role Overload
Role overload occurs when there are excessive expectations
concerning the quantity and quality of work to be completed in
a given time frame.
Role overload can have a rapid and profound impact on the incidence of
professional distress in an organization. The excessive demands for
physical and emotional energy inherent in role overload sap the
worker’s capacity for adaptation and lower the body’s resistance to disease
and injury. Role overload also decreases the strength and flexibility
of each worker’s personal defense structure. Role overload decreases the
emotional energy and the time available to a worker to seek sources of
personal and social replenishment outside the work environment.
Role overload, one of the most frequent role stressors in organizations
today, reflects the need to do “more with less” that seems to pervade
nearly every sector of our economy. Companies are cutting the number
of their employees, but not their production quotas. Companies are cutting
corners by laying off workers (to decrease benefit costs), while increasing
regular overtime for those workers who remain. Organizations
are overextending workers in an effort to “get over the hump”—the
“hump” being everything from a break into profitability to the discovery
of new revenue sources. All of these trends confirm the point that
overextended workers are often merely a reflection of the overextension
of the organization. Given our understanding of distress, it is inevitable
that these trends will affect the quality of organizational services and
products, the health and vitality of the organizational culture, and the
physical and emotional health of individual workers.
Much of the overload is due to turbulence in our organizational
ecosystems. Nowhere is this more evident than in the health care