Judi Marshall

Organisational Sources of Executive Stress and Satisfaction

Working in organisations not only provides a large section of the population with life-sustaining income, but also exerts its own pressures and stresses on them, which can ultimately have negative consequences both for achieving the goals of organisations and meeting the needs of the individuals working within them. Before we examine the various sources of executive pressure and stress at work, it might be useful to define these two central concepts. ‘Pressure’ is an external or internal force acting on an individual to perform in a particular way or achieve a particular end result. This can be a source of some discomfort and some anxiety, but it can be at the same time exciting, challenging, and growth-producing. ‘Stress’, on the other hand, has only negative outcomes for the individual concerned because (1) the individual feels that he or she will not (in the long term) be able to cope, and therefore (2) will find it necessary to deal with it in a defensive and maladaptive way. Pressure is a tolerable, manageable condition, includes some positive attributes, and is characterised by activity and productive coping; stress is a regressive and counter-productive condition, can produce extreme and usually undifferentiated anxiety, and is characterised by defensive coping.

Early Retirement and the Executive

Until very recently early retirement has not been considered a problem in Britain. Only a small number of companies and organisations allowed an individual to retire before their established normal retirement age, unless he was no longer fit to work (BIM, 1967). Few individual were interested in early retirement on account of the serious effect that this had on pension rights and benefits. The situation is rapidly changing. All the indications suggest that Britain is following the same trend noticeable much earlier in the United States. There, early retirement has become an option, if not a right, in a wide variety of industries (Myers and Fox, 1971). This is particularly true of executives, and, in addition, British managers are now accepting early retirement at an increasingly high rate.8

The Unemployed (Redundant) Executive

The number of executive redundancies is growing at a steadily increasing rate. Although a great deal has been written about it in the popular press, not enough systematic work has been done to assess the impact of this phenomenon on the psychological state of the redundant executive, his family and the wider community. It was felt, therefore, that it might be useful here, first, to review the work carried out into unemployment generally, which can provide us with insight into the nature and problems of being redundant; and second, to examine specifically the plight of executives who have lost their jobs.7

Improving the Quality of Executive Life: the Management of Stress

The extent to which stress at work produces a degree of psychological impairment has become a central issue in the current debate of the quality of working life. Various analyses of alienation as a result of paced assembly lines and other forms of mass production have spawned a range of possible initiatives to mitigate that condition: job enrichment, autonomous work groups and versions of industrial democracy are some of the best known.

Executives’ Wives: their Changing Role and its Impact on Executives at Work and Home

Recently it has been suggested (Cooper and Marshall, 1978; Marshall and Cooper, 1978) that one of the major sources of managerial stress today can be found in the occupational and domestic role conflicts experienced by the executive and his wife. It has been argued that this is due in part to the changing role of women in society, especially to the greater opportunities for women to work and the concomitant changing conceptions of marriage. Although the UK has been slower to adopt equal opportunity legislation and to create the facilities in industry and elsewhere for women to take advantage of this legislation than the US, there is a definite change in the attitudes and behaviour among a growing group of younger-generation women. This is particularly beginning to have an impact on the individual manager, and indirectly on his organisation as well. This was evident from a large-scale study undertaken to assess the sources of managerial stress, and the purpose of this chapter is to provide the reader with a profile of the changing Executive Wife, based on extensive, in-depth interviews with a large sample of managers (in a large UK organisation) and their wives, and many other less formal observations of junior to senior managers and their wives in other British companies.6

Executive Training and Development: its Positive and Negative Effects

Managers are dealing increasingly with more and more complex ‘people problems’ in the course of their work (Cooper, 1976), which has led to an enormous growth in executive training and development in the human relations or social skills. Tens of thousands of managers each year are sent on or volunteer for some form of experiential small-group training programme. After over two decades of this type of executive training, concerned people are beginning to ask: ‘what are the adverse and growthful effects of this training on the quality of executive life?’; ‘are managers showing improvements at work and home as a result of this substantial training initiative?’; and, in particular, ‘what are the psychological costs of this training on the individual, his work colleagues, his family and the organisation?’. Since experiential small-group training has become one of the most important tools in attempting to improve the quality of work relationships of managers in organisations (in the West), it was felt that we should explore in depth a study carried out by the author, for the UK Government’s Training Services Agency, into the positive and adverse effects of social skill training for managers based on experiential small-group methods.5

Climbing the Organisational Ladder: Pressures and Satisfactions at Different Levels

For many years it was assumed that the senior managers in organisations were the main sufferers of job stress. There were, indeed, a number of studies of stress-related illnesses such as coronary heart disease which showed that senior people manifested greater stress than did those of lower organisational levels (Ryle and Russell, 1949; Breslow and Buell, 1960; Syme, Hyman and Enterline, 1964). The management literature of the 1950s and 1960s also reinforced this belief, as illustrated by an executive in the Coates and Pellegrin (1975, p. 219) study: This corporation has been reorganised just so I could turn over the presidency to a younger man, I wanted to get rid of all these responsibilities, worries, and pressures. The ups and downs in the competitive business world are terrific. You’re always on the telephone, days and nights and holidays. I’ve got to get some time with my family and more time for recreation before it is too late. I haven’t had a vacation in four years, and the only way to get one is to pack up and leave town. Not all researchers or management educators were, however, in agreement.

Executives’ Half-life: Managerial Obsolescence

Executives today are bombarded on all sides by the need to change and to keep up to date with constantly changing information and work. This need is necessitated by the rapid and often violent thrust of technological change, which is a constant threat to the individual manager. The information explosion and dynamic changes stimulated by the ‘knowledge revolution’ all take their toll of today’s managers. No managerial function appears immune to these factors. Personnel, organisation development and training managers are faced with many new employment, training, redundancy and safety acts, not to mention the ever-increasing demand for industrial relations skills to cope with the fluctuating attitudes and aspirations of the workforce. Production, research and development, maintenance, transport and work study people are faced with tremendous technological advances and numerous regulations to abide by. The financial managers have to cope with many new and developing accounting procedures (e.g. inflation accounting), in addition to the many changes in taxation, company law and the ever-increasing fluctuation in the monetary markets.

How Executives Learn

Before we can begin to improve the quality of executive life, we must first understand the processes of managerial change, that is, how executives learn and under what conditions. This is important if we, as management educators, are going to be able to create organisational climates which enhance the quality of life for managers and others in the workplace. In this chapter, therefore, we will first examine the social psychological theories of learning and then outline our own dualistic theory of the processes of management learning, which highlights both the antecedent conditions and consequences of these different learning strategies.9

The Stressors on Managers at Work: an Overview

The success of any effort to minimise stress and maximise job satisfaction for managers will depend on accurate diagnosis, for different stressors will require different action. Any approach to stress reduction in an organisation which relied on one particular approach (e.g. transcendental meditation or job enrichment), without taking into account the differences within work groups or divisions, would be doomed to failure. A recognition of the possible sources of management stress therefore may help us to arrive at suggestions of ways of minimising its negative consequences. It was with this in mind that we decided to bring together the research literature in the field of management and organisational stress in a framework that would help us to identify more clearly sources of stress on managers.