Can you tell when your colleagues are stressed?

The way a person perceives stress also impacts the way their view the health and productivity of their workers, according to a new study.

A study from Tel Aviv University has found that people often project their own experiences with stress onto their colleagues and employees, causing miscommunication and, often, missed opportunities.

“This study is the first to show that our own psychological mindset determines how we judge other people’s responses to stress — specifically, whether we perceive stress as positive or negative,” said principal investigator Professor Sharon Toker of TAU’s Coller School of Management.

The research informs the way managers assess their employees’ ability to take on different workloads.

Experiments conducted by Toker and researchers Daniel Heller and Nili Ben-Avi, also of TAU’s Coller School of Management, found that a person’s individual stress mindset colours the way he or she will perceive a colleague or employee’s health, work productivity and degree of burnout.

“If a manager perceives that a certain employee doesn’t suffer from stress, that manager will be more likely to consider the employee worthy of promotion,” said Toker.

“But because the manager believes that stress is a positive quality that leads to self-sufficiency, the manager will also be less likely to offer assistance if the employee needs it.”

Toker and her colleagues recruited 377 American employees for an online ‘stress at work‘ questionnaire. Participants were asked to read a description of ‘Ben’, a fictitious employee who works long hours, has a managerial position and needs to multitask. The employees then rated his burnout levels and completed a stress mindset questionnaire about Ben.

“The more participants saw stress as positive and enhancing, the more they perceived Ben as experiencing less burnout and consequently rated him as more worthy of being promoted,” said Toker.

The researchers also wanted to see whether they could change people’s perceptions of stress and consequently change the way they perceive other people’s stress. They conducted a series of further experiments among 600 employed Israelis and Americans to determine whether their stress mindset can be cultivated or changed.

The researchers randomly assigned the employees to ‘enhancing’ or ‘debilitating’ stress mindset groups of 120–350 people. Using a technique called ‘priming’ — prompting participants to think of the word ‘stress’ in either positive or negative terms — the participants were asked to write about past stress experiences in either a ‘positive/enhancing’ or ‘negative/debilitating’ way. They were then asked to read a description of Ben’s workload and assess Ben’s burnout, rate of productivity and psychosomatic symptoms.

Participants were also asked whether Ben should be promoted and whether they would be willing to help him with his workload.

“Study participants who were primed to have a positive/enhancing stress mindset rated Ben as suffering less from stress-related symptoms and were consequently more likely to recommend Ben for promotion. They were also less likely to offer him help,” said Heller.

“But those primed to feel as though stress was debilitating/negative felt that Ben was more burned out and consequently less fit to be promoted.”

The study shows that even if stress affects a person positively, it can distort the way they see their colleagues and employees.

The research was published online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

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