People don't do their best work anxious. When they're overly worried about things, it impedes their ability to concentrate on the task at hand.
Simply put, this is a key reason why too much management stress rarely leads to the hoped-for productive outcomes.
Sure, a little stress is fine. This is work we're discussing after all, not play, and a bit of stress now and then keeps employees on their toes and wards off complacency. But a steady diet of management-induced stress leads almost to a kind of productivity indigestion - with an upset state of mind rarely resulting in focused hard work.
When I was researching and writing The Type B Manager, and reflecting on my own years in management, it became clear to me that while much management-driven stress is unintentional - indeed, many managers are unaware of the consequences of their actions - that doesn't change the reality that too large and too regular helpings of stress seldom gets management where it wants to go.
The high costs of stress - The literature of work-related stress is abundant, filled with data documenting its difficulties and considerable corporate costs. Just a few of many examples:
- ComPsych's 2014 StressPulse survey notes that 64% of employees report high stress levels, with 29% missing 3 to 6 days a year due to stress, and 16% missing more than 6 days per year. An earlier StressPulse survey noted that 46% of employees came to work 1 to 4 days per year "when too stressed to be effective," and 36% reported losing an hour or more of productivity a day.
- Absenteeism and "presenteeism" (meaning an employee is on the job, but distracted and not functioning well) are common consequences of stress overload. Harvard Business Review regularly devotes thoughtful coverage to the serious effects of workplace stress, and also publishes a helpful guide, HBR Guide to Managing Stress at Work.
- Christine Porath, a professor at Georgetown University, has done excellent work exploring the destructive effects of stress, especially as it relates to management civility. As an example, in the medical world, through research involving more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital workers, 71% connected abusive or insulting personal behavior to medical errors, and 27% even linked such problematic behavior to patient deaths.
I'd also add that in my own management experience over decades, I observed first-hand the corrosive effects of unnecessary management stress on many occasions. The dynamic almost always ended the same way: with a capable employee voting with his or her feet to leave the organization for what was hoped to be a less stressful situation - and leaving our operation with the need to rehire, retrain and work short-handed in the interim. All of which naturally impacted productivity.
As managers we tend to increase stress levels because we're concerned we're not getting the productivity we want.
The irony is that in so doing we often unwittingly further diminish the productivity we hope to increase.
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Victor is author of The Type B Manager: Leading Successfully in a Type A World (Prentice Hall Press).
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