Fundamentals of Management, 8th ed

276

Part 4: Leading

Copyright 2016 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

---

TOUGH TIMES, TOUGH CHOICES

When Stress Becomes Too Tough to Handle

In November 2009, Jason Rodriguez, a former

employee of an engineering firm in Orlando, Florida,

entered the company’s offices and opened fire with

a handgun, killing one person and wounding five

others. Rodriguez had been fired from Reynolds,

Smith & Hills less than two years earlier and told

police that he thought the firm was hindering his

efforts to collect unemployment benefits. “They left

me to rot,” he told a reporter who asked him about

his motive.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the

incidence of workplace violence has actually been

trending down over the past few years, in part

because employers have paid more attention to the

problem and taken successful preventive measures.

More and more companies, for example, have set up

employee assistance programs (EAPs) to help work-

ers deal with various sources of stress, but EAP pro-

viders report that, in the current climate of economic

uncertainty, they’re being asked to deal with a differ-

ent set of problems than the ones they’ve typically

handled in the past.

In particular, financial problems have replaced

emotional problems as employees’ primary area of

concern, and with unemployment totals approaching

27-year highs, American workers appear to be

more worried about the future than about such con-

ventional stressors as pressing deadlines and

demanding bosses. Today, says Sandra Naiman, a

Denver-based career coach, “off- and on-the-job

stresses feed into one another” to elevate stress

levels all around, and workplace stress during the

current recession may reflect this unfamiliar conver-

gence of stressors.

As yet, no hard data exist to connect workplace

violence with economic downturns, but many

professionals and other experts in the field are con-

vinced that the connection is real. ComPsych Corp.,

©

m

icro10x/

S

hutterstock.com

Excessive stress can become very debilitating. This executive, for example, is clearly experiencing

anxiety and frustration due to the pressures of her job—deadlines, tight budgets, problems with

subordinates, and increased business competition. Occasionally, stress becomes so great that

some people react with aggression and violence.

(continued)