Abstract
The study of stress and its effects on performance and wellness enjoys a history that dates back well over one hundred years (e.g., Yerkes-Dobson, 1908). For example, the physical effects of distress were noted as early as the 1500s when the Greek physician Galen observed melancholy women were more likely to develop tumors. This rich foundation of theoretical perspectives and scholarly research within the field of stress and occupational health (e.g., Cannon, 1932; Hobfol, 1989; Karasek & Theorell, 1990; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984; Quick, Quick, Nelson, & Hurrell, 1997; Selye, 1974, 1976) serves as a starting point for integrating the topics of stress, performance, and wellness into management education.
In particular, this special issue of the Journal of Management Education targets the ways we educate students about the interconnections among stress, performance, and wellness. It is inspired by the integrative nature of life and the value of teaching our students to be holistically aware of this dynamic balance—particularly within the management domain. As educators, we see firsthand the pressures that students experience, and often, we experience similar demands on our time, energy, and well-being. The ubiquitous nature of stress and its links with personal and organizational wellness alerts us to the importance of examining how we bring this significant topic into our classrooms.
The current state of stress in relation to its effects on student learning and wellness is clearly articulated in this issue’s Foreword by William Stixrud, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Behavioral Sciences, and Pediatrics at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and Director of The Stixrud Group (see http://www.stixrud.com). In his professional practice, Dr. Stixrud assesses learning difficulties and the social and emotional challenges that accompany learning difficulties and provides integrative evaluations and recommendations for enhancing learning capabilities. In this invited Foreword, Dr. Stixrud cites common stress-related issues affecting students such as sleep deprivation, substance abuse, and test anxiety and identifies the neuropsychological affects of chronic stress on learning and performance. Notably, he provides evidence of the significance and timeliness of this special issue in examining the relationships among stress, performance, and wellness.
Following this Foreword, this special issue offers six peer-reviewed articles that exemplify how we can address the interplay among stress, performance, and wellness within management education. The first two contributions present different yet comprehensive examples of course designs that focus on stress and health in the workplace. Our theme of integration continues in the next two articles: the first provides a model of teaching emotion regulation and self-leadership as complimentary stress coping strategies, while the next reports on the experimental design results of stress-related classroom interventions on students’ self-reported reduction of stress, meaningfulness, engagement in the classroom, and life satisfaction. The final two articles offer classroom pedagogies that focus on increasing student awareness of the holistic nature of stress, performance, and wellness. One presents an energy audit activity that heightens one’s awareness of differing energy levels throughout the day and week and provides guidelines for sustaining human energy. The other describes a physical fitness class period as a way to extend extant research and bring alive the connections between physical health, cognitive abilities, and effective stress management. Below, we offer more details regarding this issue’s exemplary contributions to the study of stress, performance, and wellness within the management education domain.
The Articles in This Issue
In the first article, Richard DeFrank presents the whys and hows of teaching a comprehensive course in stress and work with the purpose of helping students critically evaluate the “impact of work situations on them and their organizations and prepare them to consider effective ways to deal with these concerns.” Multidisciplinary research and accepted best practices serve as the basis for course topics such as organizational demands and stressors, the stress response, individual and organizational consequences of stress and coping strategies, as well as ways to design healthy organizations. The author provides a variety of resources to actively involve students in discovering the links among stress, performance, and wellness within a business setting.
The second article by Brad Gilbreath describes a course he designed that expands on the six components of stress and work framed in Beehr’s (1995) Model of Core and Secondary Occupational Stress Factors: work environment, environmental moderators, personal moderators, human consequences, organizational consequences, and adaptive responses. The author expounds on the teaching content within each of these areas and provides examples of self-assessments, case studies, and activities that can be used in the management classroom. An important theme in this article is to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to not just recognize the phenomenon of work stress but to apply this information to the creation of healthy workplaces.
Dr. Andrew Weil, a world-renowned leader in the field of integrative medicine, points out that stress is a natural part of life, and while we cannot always avoid stress, we can control how we respond to stress (Weil, n.d.). In our third article, Jeffery D. Houghton, Jinpei Wu, Jeffrey Godwin, Christopher Neck, and Charles Manz show how training in emotional intelligence and self-leadership strategies can help students effectively control how they respond to stress. Their model focuses on positive affect as an important component of emotion regulation and self-efficacy as a key factor that integrates the cognitive and behavioral aspects of self-leadership. The authors demonstrate how they incorporate these topics into the management curriculum and illustrate the ways in which students have effectively used these strategies for managing stress and improving performance.
Carol Flinchbaugh, E. Whitney Moore, Young Chang, and Douglas May’s contribution tests the effects of three stress management interventions (stress management techniques, gratitude journaling, and a combination of the two approaches) and a control condition on students’ stress levels, meaningfulness, engagement, and life satisfaction. The findings from their experimental design study showed that the combined intervention of stress management techniques paired with gratitude journaling resulted in student self-reported heightened levels of meaningfulness and engagement in the classroom. The authors provide details of the specific interventions so that these tools can be used by management educators.
In our first exercise article of this special issue, Gretchen Spreitzer and Traci Grant offer an intervention that students can use to manage their energy. Using an initial energy audit as the foundation, students come to an understanding of their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual energy fluctuations. Various interventions are introduced to students that provide ways to increase energy in all four areas. The goal is for management students to “develop healthy habits around energy to sustain their energy for high performance for a lifetime.” While most managers focus on environmental and economic sustainability, Spreitzer and Grant advance the notion that human sustainability is increasingly important for today’s managers.
Completing the special issue and using the theoretical underpinning of the strong connection between individuals’ physical and mental states, Amy Kenworthy and George Hrivnak offer an exercise in a nontraditional teaching context (a fitness session in a gymnasium) to aid students’ understanding of their mind–body connection. This article provides management educators a tool to increase awareness of the connections between physical exercise and mental wellness. In addition to creating a new and unique learning opportunity to further explore the interplay between physical and mental states, the authors report on key themes of student learning and their relevance to management education.
We hope you enjoy reading this special issue as much as we enjoyed the editorial process of working with these scholars. In the pages to follow, the contributing authors share their passion for the stress, performance, and wellness field. After reading this issue, we hope your ability to integrate the topics of stress, performance, and wellness in your classrooms increases as well.
References
Supplementary Material
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