Workplace Stress

Leadership Friedman, Stewart D. 2002. "Leadership DNA: The Ford Motor Story.(Ford Motor Co.'s leadership training policy)." Training & Development, March. In this article, Friedman describes an innovative leadership program instituted at Ford Motor Company. It is designed to identify employees with leadership potential, help the company stay competitive, and pull the leaders of the company together to make changes that will allow the company to change and keep up with changing times.

It also serves the purpose of speeding up the development of executives, and communicates the beliefs and practices (what Friedman calls "culture") throughout the company. In addition, the program has the goal of making the company more environmentally and socially sensitive, and this includes the executives in this program, who include some sort of social program in what they do. Interestingly, the program does not build in any extra time for the people who enroll in it.

It is up to them to delegate, organize, and find other time-saving strategies to make room for the extra demands. While this might be a situation that could cause extra stress in an individual, they are also given the power and authority to do this. Thus they begin to learn the executive skill of delegating. By comparison, many other studies have demonstrated that a feeling that a person has little or no power or decision-making authority can significantly add to stress (Nelson, et. al., 2001, Petrus & Kleiner, 2003).

The employees are given considerable authority to find a project that they believe will increase productivity, increase the bottom line, or improve customer satisfaction. They make use of computer connections to allow people to work together in chat rooms on projects of mutual interest. In addition, people can nominate themselves to enter this program. All these things increase a feeling of control and power, which may.