Problem 1:
If poor performance is not attributable to work design or organizational process problems, attention should be focused on the employee. The problem may lie in some aspect of the person's relationship to the organization or supervisor, some area of the employee's personal life, or a training or developmental deficiency. Think about how this relates to poor performance as you answer this week's questions.
A. What are the two possible attributions of poor performance? What are the implications of each?
B. How can managers and supervisors best provide useful performance feedback?
C. If a conflict occurred between your self-evaluation and the evaluation given to you by your supervisor or instructor, how would you respond? What, specifically, would you do?
D. In your own work or school experience, what have learned from your supervisor during the past several weeks? What techniques did your instructor or supervisor use to help you learn?
Problem 2: Predictors of harmful stress for one individual may have beneficial effects for another. The Achilles heel phenomenon suggests that people break down at their weakest point. Individual differences in approaches to the stress-strain relationship relate to gender effects, Type A behavior patterns, personality hardiness, and self-reliance. Consider these approaches as you prepare to participate in the discussion this week.
A. How do individual differences such as gender, Type A behavior, personality hardiness, and self-reliance moderate the relationship between stress and strain?
B. Why should organizations help individuals manage stress?
C. Isn't stress basically the individual's responsibility? Explain.
A critical factor in promoting a healthy work environment is the stage at which stress is managed. The three levels of prevention are the primary prevention stage (designed to reduce or eliminate the stressor), the secondary prevention stage (designed to modify the response to stress), and the tertiary prevention stage (designed to heal symptoms of distress).
Read several studies on primary prevention, secondary prevention, and tertiary prevention of stress and compare them to each other. Identify at least one organizational stress management method aligned with each type of prevention. Which one do you believe would be most effective, and why?