Preventing Stress in Organizations: How to Develop Positive Managers

1 Introduction 1

What is Stress? 2

What Stress is Not: Common Misperceptions 3

Common Causes of Stress 4

Work-Related Stress and the Line Manager 5

Summary 9

References 9

2 Why managing stress is important: The business and legal reasons 11

The Business Case 11

The Costs of Work-Related Stress 12

Calculating the Cost of Stress to Your Business 19

What Should We Be Doing to Monitor these Costs? 23

The Legal Case 24

Legal Cases of Work-Related Stress 25

What Should We Be Doing to Comply with Legislation? 28

Summary 29

References 29

3 How to manage work-related stress 31

Prevention 32

Training and Development 35

Support 37

Organizational, Manager and Team, and Individual Level Interventions 38

What Should Our Organization Be Doing? 41

Where Does the Line Manager Fit In? 42

Summary 44

Reference 44

4 Developing a framework to promote positive manager behaviour 45

Rationale: The Need For a Stress Management Approach Focusing on Positive Manager Behaviour 46

Why We Took a Competency-Based Approach 49

The Research Underlying the Positive Manager Behaviour Framework and Approach 51

The Positive Manager Behaviour Framework 55

Evidence to Support a Positive Manager

Behaviour Approach 56

Useful Resources 64

References 65

5 Respectful and responsible: Managing emotions and having integrity (management competency 1) 67

Integrity 68

Managing Emotions 75

Considerate Approach 81

Summary 85

References 87

6 Managing and communicating existing and future work (management competency 2) 89

Proactive Work Management 90

Problem Solving 101

Participative/Empowering 106

Summary 119

References 121

7 Managing the individual within the team (management competency 3) 123

Personally Accessible 124

Sociable 132

Empathetic Engagement 137

Summary 144

References 145

8 Reasoning/managing difficult situations (management competency 4) 147

Managing Conflict 148

Use of Organizational Resources 157

Taking Responsibility for Resolving Issues 164

Summary 168

References 169

9 Overcoming barriers to positive manager behaviour 171

Personal Level Barriers 172

Individual Work or Job Level Barriers 176

Team and Relationship Level Barriers 182

Organizational and Wider Level Barriers 186

Reference 189

10 Supporting managers to change their behaviour 191

Behaviour Change Is Possible 192

Theories of Behaviour Change 193

Implementing Behaviour Change Interventions 195

References 207

11 Is stress management just good management? 209

Comparing Positive Manager Behaviour with General Management/Leadership Competency Frameworks 211

Implications for Practice 214

How to Do Your Own Mapping 215

How to Identify Missing Positive Manager Behaviour Elements 224

How to Integrate Missing Positive Manager Behaviour Elements 225

Valuing People Management Skills 227

References 230

12 The way forward 231

Where are You Now? 231

Starting Out – Understanding Positive Manager Behaviour and How It Might Be Useful 233

Deciding How to Use Positive Manager Behaviour 234

Gaining Buy-In 240

Applying Positive Manager Behaviour 244

Sustainable Impact 250

References 253

Appendix 255

Index 261