Stress: Its an Individual Thing

It has been found for some time now that organisation wide stress interventions (changing organisational structures, removing stressors etc.) simply do not have a significant effect in improving workplace distress (for those interested the most recent meta analyses can be found here and a full text article can be found here).

As this finding is relatively consistent it was unsurprising to find that Randall, Nielsen, & Tvedt accept this in one of the most recent issue of Work and Stress. I was surprised however, to find the following statement "However, organizational-level interventions are usually based on well-validated theory and are therefore unlikely to be inherently ineffective'. The reason appears sound however, suggesting that much research in this area include "problems with the processes of intervention planning and/or implementation, or a hostile context, as being possible reasons for disappointing results" and "that what participants experience during the intervention is not always the same as what had been planned for them".

There is however another possible conclusion. In 1993 Richard Lazarus pointed out the problem of stress interventions which "[treat] everyone as though they were alike, and work environments as though they have common effects on everyone" (the full article can be found here and should be downloaded and read by everyone interested in this area). Indeed, this has been backed up by recent research out of that the Max Planck Institute of Human Development. Their article found that the majority of variance in stress and engagement and, the factors that predict it, is explained at the individual rather than the organisational level concluding "most of the variability in teachers’ emotional and motivational experience can thus be ascribed to individual rather than school factors". I like wise found this to be the case in my article in Teacher and Teacher Education.

The major point being that individuals within groups tend to vary far more than groups vary from each other. People appraise the same stressors differently, aim to cope with them in different ways, and evaluate the resources at their disposal with different perceptions of their sufficiency.