Where Do Your Work Expectations Come From?

For decades, much research on work stress has focused on several topics: control/autonomy over work, the meaningfulness of work, and support structures from supervisors, organizational leadership, and colleagues.

One of my bugbears is how infrequently these things get talked about in mainstream business press, most of which focus on more perfunctory interventions to help employees manage their stress, such as breathing exercises, taking breaks, and leaving work at work. None of this is bad advice, it’s just inadequate advice because it ignores the root of the problem, or even that dealing with work stress in a two-sided coin of appropriate employee resilience for the given profession (per my previous piece), and employer awareness of what should, and shouldn’t be expected.

One of the reasons for this kind of advice is that it doesn’t require any digging — when we’re all so busy. I understand this on many levels, but if surface-level band-aids are enough, then perhaps we should all just have a gin and tonic at three in the afternoon — it would surely make the last few hours less stressful!

A bigger (and deeper) question for managing work stress is where do employee expectations come from? On the one hand, we are told that everyone is an individual, that we are all different, and that no two people are the same. On the…