Stress management interventions: what do managers actually do?

Presents a report of research which surveyed managers' views on stress, their beliefs about stress interventions and who should be responsible for addressing job-related stress problems. Stress management interventions have embedded in them a range of practices that offer opportunities for individual development and employee wellbeing. Equally, though, there is a strongly-held belief that many interventions fall short, because they offer only a partial solution or fail to recognize the wider contextual-structural issues within which organisational behaviour takes place. One reason for this may be that little attempt has been made to find out what managers understand by stress and the extent to which they think that their organisation has a responsibility to address problems of stress. Both qualitative and quantitative techniques were used to explore these issues, using a sample of 540 New Zealand managers. The results draw attention to a number of issues including: do managers' views of stress reflect acknowledged definitions? Who should assume responsibility for managing stress? What do managers mean when they indicate that an intervention is effective? Are stress interventions any different from standard human resource practices and is there a role for theory in stress interventions?