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

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t h e i n c e st u o u s wo r k p lac e
2.5 The Environmental Approach:
Professional Distress as Imperfections
in the Organizational Environment
The four organizational approaches to worker distress described so far
all share one thing in common. They view the individual employee as
the origin of professional distress, and utilize remediation strategies that
seek to change the individual in some manner. The next approach ignores
individual issues and defines the problem of professional distress
solely as a malfunctioning work environment.
Many managers recognize distress-related problems in employees and
see these problems as emerging from the structure or process of the organization.
These managers are constantly tinkering with the organizational
structure—altering roles, policies, and procedures, and continually
creating and then casting off new work norms—all in an effort to discover
the magical structure that gets the work done and makes everyone
happy. Anytime an employee reports, “We’ve really got a problem
with . . . ,” this type of manager immediately jumps into action to manipulate
the environment to address the problem.
During the years that my own management style tended to reflect
this knee-jerk approach to management, much of my environmental
tinkering aimed at reducing the distress of my employees actually increased
their distress. It wasn’t my resistance to change but my propensity
for constant superficial changes that created an unpredictable and
unstable work milieu.
Most managers want to be seen as capable decision makers, problem
solvers, and innovators. Most managers, more than some would care to
admit, want to be liked by those who work for them. It is discomforting
to discover how such benign intentions can lead to inconsistent, rapidly
changing, and stress-provoking conditions in a work unit. Some of the
more common problems with this management approach are cataloged
below.
Many managers who exemplify the environmental approach to
worker distress fail to control the pace of change in their organizational
units. Reflect back on the definition of stress as a demand for adaptational
change, and it will be clear that we must gear the pace of change
to the level of adaptational energy available to our employees. This is
true even when we make changes in the environment to alleviate worker
distress. There may be important changes that should be postponed or
phased in slowly simply because employees have already experienced
too much change in too short a time period.