Organizational behavior concepts and practices

Stress

My organization had only limited teamwork. Most people worked by themselves, or in two-person units, so there was a lot of independence. Is it coincidence that decision-making was quick and there was only limited stress?

Decision-making is a challenge for many organizations. There are a number of different factors that affect decision-making, including the size of the decision-making team. Where I worked, decisions were decentralized. They were usually minor decisions, but they were made by one or two people at most. There was a belief within the company that everybody in the company was knowledgeable and capable of making good decisions. So there was a level of empowerment that made people feel good, and confident with respect to decision-making. It was actually quite refreshing. But big decisions were made centrally. They were still made by individual managers, however, again showing that while teams might be good for some tasks, they were viewed by the company as being less effective with respect to decision-making.

There is the risk that team-based decision-making results in consensus decisions, and these are often not the optimal decision, but the one that is basically the path of least resistance, where everybody can kind of agree. My organization sought the best decisions. It is worth knowing that this worked well within the context of workplace stress. Each job was broken down into pieces big enough for a single person -- or at most two people -- to tackle. The result of that was a high degree of independence. Teams were basically discouraged, because of a number of factors. These included groupthink, social loafing and the tendency towards consensus, all of which are basically forms of inefficiency.

Stress

The company actually had a low level of interaction between workers, and this included the bosses. The interactions were fairly mundane in nature. I found this to be a workplace with a fairly low level of stress. If you do your job well, you have only a small amount of stress, say if there are factors that prevent you from doing your job. But in other positions, dealing with groups of people in particular proved to be a source of stress, because even when you are working fairly well, you cannot do anything without a big discussion to try to build consensus. Not only is this a slow-moving organizational way of thinking, but it puts you in a state of constant conflict to get your ideas implemented. That can be frustrating, and I find that work is less stressful when I am not constantly having to deal with co-workers and argue with them to get things done.

I remember working in a company that was being taken over and that was probably the most stressful thing for me in my career. I had a low level job, but everybody was so anxious about the future that they started getting defensive. This created a toxic atmosphere at the company. For me, this was not something I wanted.