Managing Organizational Stress: A Field Experiment

Although the deleterious effects of work-related stress on employee well-being and organizational effectiveness have received wide attention in the literature, few, if any, controlled experiments have been attempted to assess the effects of stress reduction interventions. In the present study, a stress management training program was evaluated in a field experiment with 79 public agency employees who were randomly assigned to treatment (« = 40) and control (n - 39) groups. The training program consisted of 16 hours of group exposure distributed over 8 weeks. Using procedures based upon those developed by Meichenbaum (1975), treatment subjects were taught to recognize and alter their cognitive interpretations to stressful events at work. Subjects were also taught progressive relaxation techniques to supplement this process. Dependent variables were epinephrine and norepinephrme excretion at work, anxiety, depression, irritation, and somatic complaints, all measured at three times (pretest, posttest, and 4 months after treatment). Treatment subjects exhibited significantly lower epinephrine and depression levels than did controls at the posttest, and 4-month follow-up levels did not regress to pretest levels. However, treatment effects were not replicated in a subsequent intervention on the original control group. The general adoption of such stress management programs was not recommended.