Ravalier PhD Theis.pdf - Anglia Ruskin Research Online

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stressors from the workplace. It has also been concluded that 70% of said
research included some degree of secondary intervention (Giga, Cooper &
Farragher, 2003). Kompier and Cooper (1999) state that there are a few
main reasons as to why individually-focussed approaches are often
preferred to primary interventions:
I. It is easier for management to blame the personality and lifestyle choices of
employees than to take responsibility for dealing with stress. Therefore secondary
and tertiary reactionary techniques are ideally placed and suited to the needs and
beliefs of the management.
II. Organisational psychologists often concentrate on subjective and individual
differences. As such these psychologists and ‘experts’ will utilise the stress reduction
techniques that suit their methods of inquiry, without further investigation of other
issues.
III. Organisations change at a frantic pace and it is therefore be difficult to introduce
systematic interventions within them. Organisations must change and adapt on a
near-daily basis due to the pressures put on them, both internally and externally. As
such, methods of working and organisational outcomes and priorities will change
constantly, meaning that a group’s ability to change their stress-reducing practices
within these dynamic organisations is going to be challenged.
IV. The lack of definite empirical evidence on the costs and benefits of stress
interventions. Due to this lack of explicit, clear-cut evidence on the effects of primary
changes on organisational outcomes such as productivity and cost, management have
very little to convince them to make primary stress-related changes.
However, there are now increasing calls for a paradigm shift, away
from viewing work stress as a subjective and individual problem to one
that needs to be assessed and dealt with by organisations as a whole.
This new paradigm views it as the management’s job and responsibility to
adapt to any changes in its organisation in order to empower employees
to manage their occupational stress effectively (Ongori & Agolla, 2008).
Both the transactional definition of stress and the JDCS theory of
workplace stress suggest that stress is, rather than being ‘blamed’ on the
individual, due to a certain set of environmental and personal
characteristics. However, this is not the premise that follows the use of