Our stress response in the context of an evolutionary perspective is a response to encounter adversity in our lives, resulting in physiological stimulus and increased attention and focus on the imminent or perceived threat. It is our hard-wired survival mechanism.
Stress in the form of eustress (‘eu’ being the Greek word for good) can be helpful in harnessing our capability to meet challenges, engaging our operating system in the cognitive context to realise our potential.
Distress could be described as an overload of the operating system, narrowing of perspective, and resulting in cognitive impairment and loss of productivity. In essence we have engaged in survival mode.
The primary area of the brain that deals with stress is its limbic system. Because of its enormous influence on emotions and memory, the limbic system is often referred to as the emotional brain. It is also called the mammalian brain, because it emerged with the evolution of our warm-blooded relatives, and marked the beginning of social cooperation in the animal kingdom.
A functional workplace revolves around a good level of social cooperation, organisational awareness around role clarity and expectations, and of importance the level of leadership support.
“Occupational stress is stress related to one’s job. Occupational stress often stems from unexpected responsibilities and pressures that do not align with a person’s knowledge, skills, or expectations, inhibiting one’s ability to cope. Occupational stress can increase when workers do not feel supported by supervisors or colleagues, or feel as if they have little control over work processes[i].”
When we consider the notion of a ‘safe workplace’ this typically leads to identifying physical hazards and implementing the associated risk controls. Psychosocial hazards also exist and are often inadvertently created through organisational practices and the way people interact.
The following extract from The Australian Workplace Barometer: Report on psychosocial safety climate and worker health in Australia[ii] states:
Several questions we can ask as leaders of an organisation are:
- “How would we describe the level of social cooperation in the organisation?”
- “How would we rate the current state of worker psychological health and wellbeing?”
- “Are our organisational practices fostering productivity and long term sustainability?”
- “ Does our leadership actively consider the psychological well-being of self as a leader, and of the people within the organisation?”
Our Organisational Coaching focuses on enhancing both self and organisational awareness at the leadership level. We explore organisational practices and the levels of Social and Emotional Intelligence that contribute towards building increased social cooperation within the organisation, functional teams and increased productivity.
[i] en.wikipedia.org · Text under CC-BY-SA license
[ii] The Australian Workplace Barometer: Report on psychosocial safety climate and worker health in Australia Prepared by Prof Maureen Dollard, Tessa Bailey, Dr Sarven McLinton, Penelope Richards, Wes McTernan, Assoc Prof Anne Taylor and Stephanie Bond University of South Australia Centre for Applied Psychological Research