New insights into how employees manage stressful situations at work
Researchers have developed a new tool which could bene¿t organizations and their staff by assessing employees’ beliefs about how they manage challenging and stressful situations at work.
Self-ef¿cacy — the belief in one’s capabilities to achieve a goal or an outcome — is a key variable for understanding how people manage themselves and their behavior at work, given its inàuence on motivation, well-being, and personal achievement and ful¿lment, sciencedaily. com reported.
Employees must not only accomplish tasks but also manage their negative emotions as well as interpersonal relationships. Despite this, self-ef¿cacy has mainly been assessed in relation to job tasks, not emotions and interpersonal aspects.
This research aimed to ¿ll the gap by developing and testing a new work self-ef¿cacy scale to assess individuals’ perceived ability not only in managing tasks, but also negative emotions, being empathic and being assertive. It involved academics at the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Norwich Business School, the Department of Psychology at Sapienza University of Rome, Uninettuno Telematic International University, and the Center for Advances in Behavioral Science at Coventry University.
Results from two studies, involving a total of 2,892 Italian employees, provide evidence of the added value of a more comprehensive approach to the assessment of self-ef¿cacy at work. They also suggest the new scale has practical implications for management and staff, for example in recruitment and appraisal processes, as well career development and training.
The ¿ndings, published in Journal of Vocational Behavior, show that:
● The more employees perceive themselves as able to manage their tasks and effectively ful¿l their goals (task self-ef¿cacy), the better they perform and the less they are likely to misbehave at work.
● The more employees perceive themselves as able to manage their negative emotions in stressful and conàict situations (negative emotional self-ef¿cacy), the less they report physical symptoms and the less they experience negative emotions in relation to their job.
● The more employees perceive themselves as able to understand their colleagues’ moods and states (empathic selfef¿cacy), the more they are likely to go the extra mile in their working lives and help their colleagues.