Topic: Stress/Job Satisfaction

Briefly describe the topic and why it is important and relevant to you

I hold a firm belief that if you are potentially going to spend thousands of hours doing something, it is your responsibility to yourself and those around you to make sure that it is something that you enjoy doing, even if it requries significant personal investment. One's choice in career holds a significant influence over how one is able to spend their time. Speaking from my own work experience, I find that my overall happiness in life is strictly correlational to my satisfaction with my work environment. If I am forced to spend the majority of my day in an environment that I cant stand to be in, that attitude will stay with me even when I leave this environment. Similarly, I find that when my work satisfies me in terms of environment, financial compensation, and management, I am able to enjoy my time at home more easily. The patterns in worker psychology outlined in this text have indicated to me that I am not the type of worker who is capable of working to their fullest potential in environments that I find displeasurable due to the demands and the work that I am doing. Therefore, it will be important for me to make sure that I enjoy what I am doing by finding a work environment wherein my personality characteristics and skills are compatible with the factors in the environment in order to minimize the presence of hindrance related stress. Reading this text has given me the information I needed to determine what kind of environment is most compatible with my personality in my future career choices.








Describe how you will use this knowledge in your personal or professional life

I have worked jobs where I am deeply dissatisfied with my how I spent my time working. Out of all the jobs I've had, the one that I disliked the most was McDonald's. This job was a hotbed of stress and frustration because of several factors. For one, the environment had a strong smell. I have always been sensitive to strong odors, and due to the constant scent of frying foods, I felt constantly on edge, always wanting to go get a breath of fresh air and never being able to. On top of this, the management was very conservative about letting you go on breaks, and wasn't very willing to take your input on schedules unless you had a really good reason for wanting a certain day off. You constantly had some watching you and criticizing your work, which added even more pressure. On top of this, the work was very fast paced most of the time. The kitchen was full of alarms with high pitched beeps that were always going off. The work that I did involved cooking meat. Due to poor equipment design, I was constantly being burned and splashed with hot grease. The high expectations of management encouraged me to work as fast as I could, leading to mistakes and accidents such as knocking over a stack of trays or dropping raw meat on the floor. These factors culminated in me feeling a large amount of hindrance related stress every day. This is the kind of stress you feel when you are having difficulty overcoming factors in your environment that make it harder to do your job. Challenge related stress is stress that increases productivity and gives the worker a feeling of accomplishment after completing their task (Shultz & Shultz, 2010).


When I worked here, I was immensely dissatisfied, but this was my first job and I was having trouble finding another one. Eventually, I had noticed that I could never shake my bad mood. I constantly smelled like fried foods and was having trouble relaxing when I wasn't working. After a year, I finally had enough and quit wihtout having found another job yet. Even though I disliked this job so much, I am glad that I experienced it. The foul memories that I have of this job served me well. I can recall a good deal of memories from this job that relate directly to the portions of the text regarding poor equipment design, fatigue, and work pressure.

Looking back on this job, there are several factors in the text that could have been applied to my work environment in order to increase my satisfaction. I will start with the equipment design. Firstly, the vents over the friers could have been lowered, and had more powerful fans to better suck up the smell that I hated. Additionally, when you are cooking meat, the hot grease tended to pop up and burn your arms when you are taking meat off of the grill. If I were an engineering psychologist, I would have designed the grills so that they are wider and don't go back as far so that you didn't have to put your arms over the grease to pull the meat in the back. I also would have appreciated if I had more input on my scheduling. I was constantly scheduled at seven in the morning, even if I asked to work later shifts. This lead to be coming into work feeling fatigued, making me less productive and more prone to accidents such as dropping meat or making a mistake when assembling sandwiches. I was also deeply dissatisfied with the way the managers behaved. I felt that many of them were immature and did very little to increase group cohesion. For one, they would often subtly shame or demean employees who made an error such as building a sandwich wrong. I remember one manager literally throwing an incorrectly made sandwich back on the assembly line. I thought that this was completely unacceptable, and was one of the final straws in me leaving.  Overall, I feel like investments in equipment upgrades to improve worker satisfaction would have been irrational to expect, as this is essentially the lowest level of worker in the economy, and employees were easily dispensed of and replaced if they weren't willing to put up with the environment.

Working in a high paced, semi-hostile environment lead me to feeling constantly stressed in my free just from knowing that I had to go back there the next day. In all actuality, I feel a certain respect for the kind of person who can go back to that place day after day, year after year. As I was thinking back on this, I felt that there was one person who perfectly fit the description of hardiness. The text defines people that are hardy have "attitudes that make them more resistant to stress" (Shultz & Shultz, 2010). I would add that people who are hardy are the type who intepret stress as a positive influence more than they do a negative one.

	 I worked with someone named Cameron who was the perfect example of a hardy person who thrives in a high stress environment. Cameron was right about my age, but he felt much older. He was very talkative and always laughing about things that weren't funny. I would certainly describe him as an extravert. I'd even go as far as to say that I found him obnoxious. He had been working there since the store opened, and knew everything about the kitchen inside and out. His arms had lots of burn spots on them. He also had family who worked at the restauraunt. I believe that this was a factor in why he sometimes acted like he owned the place. Despite this, he was always the one who worked the hardest. Whenever the screens that told the people in the kitchen what food to make would completely fill up, his mood would get charged up and he'd make all of the food on the screens faster than the people up front could serve it to the customers. This indicates that he had high confidence in his abilities, which is known as high self-efficacy. At the time, I was pretty amazed by how fast he could work when we got really busy. When I was in a position like that, and there was no one else to help me, I would get really frustrated and angry because I felt so overwhelmed. Working alone in a situation like that, Cameron could probably do what it would take two or three of me to do. His abilities were according to the text, a significant factor in his ability to function in this envronment because "Employees with high skill levels usually find their work less stressful than do employees with lower skill levels" (Shultz & Shultz, 2010). Similarly, the loud beeping of the ovens and cabinets did not bother him as much as me because he was almost deaf, and wore a hearing aid in both of his ears. One time, I asked him if the smell of the chicken cooking in the vats bothered him. He told me that he worked at a garbage dump over the summer as his first job before he started working at McDonalds, and that that smell was nothing to him. Thusly, that hindrance related stressors that bothered me so much bounced right off of him, allowing him to work to his fullest productivity during periods where in which high levels of Challenge-related stress were present. Thusly, because he was so accustomed to this environment,

In addition to his general compatiblity with the factors that I found to be hindring, his personality traits significantly differed from mine, giving rise in him the ability to thrive in areas where I could not. Where I was introverted and wanted to keep to myself, he was eager to communicate with everyone in the kitchen and the people up front with a booming voice. When things would begin to get really busy in the kitchen I would lose motivation and work slower, whereas he would get a burst of energy and work faster. Where my senses were irritated by the environment, his were hardened and attuned to it. It is easy to see why that place didn't bother him as much. I say all of this to illustrate that for every work environment, there are individual levels of compatibility. Everything about his personality and experience was more attuned to the necessitations of his environment, and as a result of his natural compatibility, his skill level and self actualization within the environment superceded all that which I could hope to attain there. Moreover, he was immune to the Hindrance related stress that was the root of my job dissatisfaction, and responded well to the Challenge related stress that comes during a dinner rush. This does not mean that I do not respond well to Challenge-related stress. At my current job, I will often come in to find that a large portion of the work that was supposed to be done before my shift wasw nto completed. In situations such as this, I feel a burst of energy, similar to the one I would see Cameron get int he kitchen during a rush. When this happens, I work must faster than usual, and won't take a break so that the people who work in the morning wont have to do extra work. I was not able to develop this skill in my old work environment because I didn't like the managers, so I had no reason to please them with my extra effort. Additionally, because I disliked both the work and the work environment so much, even if I did work as hard as I could, I wouldn't have been able to feel the satisfaction of a completed challenge. My current work environment allows me to enjoy working hard because I am not working hard to appease managers who are telling me to work faster, but because I respect the managers who work in the morning and want to show them that I can do a good job for the sake of doing a good job.


I would go as far to say that Cameron would likely be incompatible with my particular work environment. Due to his higher attenuation to social interaction, he would probably find it hard to work at night with no one to talk to, whereas I find the silence very soothing and comfortable. He would probably get bored doing the same repetivie things all night, wihtout having a rush to put all his effort into, whereas I enjoy the low pressure but consistant work flow. In all honesty, he probably would still be amazing at my job, but there is no way that his personality is more compatible with the environment than mine. This goes to show that we are very different people on multiple fundamental levels. By comparing Camerons hardy personality to my own using the text, I have realized that my personality is incompatible with working in constantly high paced, stressful environments, and that it would be wise for me to avoid these sorts of environments if I hope to be happy in my future career choices.

CHALLENGE VS HINDRANCE RELATED STRESS 287

CAMERON HARDY 288

"Employees with high skill levels usually find their work less stressful than do employees with lower skill levels"


PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL 121





I was more accident prone because I was distracted by how dissatisfied I was.

However, I believe that I was simply fundamentally incompatible with the environment its self, and while I believe that if these changes had been implemented, it would have only staved off temporarily my overall dissatisfaction with my career, and I would have eventually still left.



Within the last couple of months, I have begun to work the night shift. I believe this factor of my employment keeps me the most satisfied.






page 261
288



Topic: Ergonomics/Work Environment


Ergonomics is a study derivative of engineering psychology. Ergonomics serves to heighten worker productivity by enhancing the physical compatibility between the tool and the worker by altering the tools design. In years past, workers tended to develop chronic ailments such as Repetitive Strain Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome due to the tools' designers neglecting to take into account the physical limitations of the workers operating the machines. I have experience with these forms of injuries in both my present and past lines of work, so the topic is rather near and dear to me, so I was glad to see it included in the text. Smilarly to the manner in which butchers mentioned in the text developed repetitive strain injuries from constantly using their wrists to cut meat with knives, I found that after a few weeks of cutting fruit for several hours straight, I was beginning to develop carpal tunnel syndrome.






Briefly describe the topic and why it is important and relevant to you

My current job is working overnight in the produce department refridgerator of Shaws. I spend most of my time skinning and slicing several shopping carts full of watermellons, cantaloupe, strawberries and pineapples. I then put this product in plastic cups and bowls, which are sold that day, after my shift ends. While I find the majority of the factors in my current line of employement to be to my personal satisfaction, that does not mean that it is entirely perfect. In terms of the factors that I was critical of at McDonalds, my current job is a massive improvement. The air insdie the refridgerator is fresh because its is always being circulated by a device on the ceiling. The management is also of an entirely different calibre. Even if they are critical of my work, they adress the issue in a forward but discreet manner.  The managers are much more open to taking input on the schedules, and I can almost always get the days that I request off. Similarly, once I mentioned that it would be preferable for me to work overnight shifts, they almost immediately gave me the option to work at night.

 Due to several factors overlapping, my productivity has skyrocketed. When you work overnight, you get to be alone in the department. This means that there is no one to come ask you to do something for them, or customers knocking on the department door asking for you to help them find an item on the sales floor. Naturally, I am able to instead devote more of my time to cutting all the fruit that the people in the morning will need. BEcause there was no one to pressure me into working faster, I was able to let my mind wander as I cut the fruit, and time seemed to fly, even though I was still working quickly. Naturally, there is a lot less time pressure at night, but my productivity and motivation didn't decline because I enjoy the environment so much that I worked even harder than I did in the day because working at night felt like a privilege. The relaxing atmosphere stays with me after I leave, and I never dread going into work the next day like I had with my other jobs.

That is not to say, of course, that this job is perfect. Even though I am much more compatible with this environment, work schedule, and type of work, there was still the nagging pain in my wrists. I'd say about eighty percent of my night consists of me skinning melons and pineapples with a knife. After about one hour of cutting, my wrist would begin to ache and sting until I had to put the knife down and run them under warm water. I was ina  bit of a delima because even though I was enjoying the environment and pacing of the work, the work its self was causing me physical pain. MY first remedy was to buy a grip trainer on the internet. This helped my wristaches when I was at home after my shift, but I was still feeling pain after about an hour of cutting fruit. There was a portion of Feldmans text that actually inspired me to purchase my own knife to use on the job so that I wouldn't have to deal with the chronic pain.

As we were reading Part five of the text, I had already purchased a grip trainer, but was still feeling the effects of repetitive strain while I was working. As we were reading, I came across a passage regarding industrial hand held tools stating that "Hand tools should be designed so that workers can use them without bending their wrist; Hands are less vulnerable to injury when the wrists can be kept straight. One General principle of good tool design from a human factors standpoint is to bend the tool, not the wrist" (Shultz & Shultz, 2010). This gave me the idea to look online to see if there was a type of knife that was less fatigueing and more suited for long term use. After some searching, I found something called an offset knife. Offset knives are knives with bent handles that bend upwards so that you can make cuts without having to bend your wrist paralel to the table. After I began to use this style of knife at work, I noticed an immediate difference in the level of fatigue that I felt aftrer cutting for an hour or two. Thusly, studying this text has had a positive influence on my professional life.