Julia A. M. Reif - Dealing With Stress in a Modern Work Environment: Resources Matter

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To call stress a pandemic, as many authors on the topic do, seems inappropriate in times of Covid-19. However, in fact, stress is a global problem, and a severe burden on the body, soul, and economy, as is a pandemic. Stress can lead to physical and mental illnesses and costs organizations billions of dollars due to employees sick leave or reduced performance.

As economic and organizational psychologists, we want to support employees, managers, and organizational experts in effectively counteracting stress and making use of resources in the working world. We see ourselves, like our chair Prof. Dr. Felix Brodbeck, in the tradition of economic and organizational psychology, which has the goal of providing evidence-based insights on human behavior and experience at work to companies and public organizations.

By explaining what stress is (Chap.).

This book is based on the German book Effektiver Umgang mit Stress Gesundheitsmanagement im Beruf (Reif, Spie, & Stadler, 2018). However, we did not just translate the book into English, but transferred the previous work into an international context. We reviewed numerous current scientific meta-analyses and reviews on stress, stressors, resources, and the corresponding practice-oriented literature and put them into a comprehensible and illustrative form. Moreover, we delved deeper into the discussion of new forms of stressors and resources due to the rising spread and use of digital technologies.

Stress and strain arise in a complex system of stressors and resources that encompasses the person, the environment, and their transactions. Science can offer assistance in managing this complexity, for example by carrying out evaluation studies on health interventions in organizations and figuring out their effectiveness by applying criteria for a humane working environment. A humane design of work implies that people can carry out their activities without any risk to their health, which also positively affects their well-being and motivation. In this sense, this book emphasizes the fundamental role of resources in the stress process and shows how a combination of organizational and individual-level interventions can counteract stress in different phases of the stress process.

We want to thank Felix Brodbeck, Keri Hartman, Jrgen Schultz-Gambard, Peter Stadler, Ralph Wosche, and our students for their support and inspiring discussions, and our families and friends for their patience when we were once again lost in our thoughts on the book and its contents.

Stress was born in 1936 when Hans Selye, a doctor from Vienna, created the word stress to describe the bodys non-specific response to any demand for change (Selye, ).

The world is stressed. When asked whether they experienced stress during much of the day yesterday, 55% of Americans said yes. The number of stressed people was higher only in Greece (59%), the Philippines (58%), and Tanzania (57%) (Gallup, ).