U.S. employees work harder now than ever before, and almost 75 percent report regularly experiencing job-related stress symptoms. Stress costs organizations an estimated $30 billion a year in lost productivity, and hundreds of billions a year if you include health care costs and absenteeism. This activity is important because managers can help to decrease unnecessary workplace stressors, and can help employees to experience fewer stress symptoms, if they are attuned to the sources from which workplace stress can manifest. The goal of this exercise is to challenge your knowledge of the six sources of work-related stress. For each person, select the source of job-related stress that his or her example best depicts.

Demands created by individual differences

Individual task demands

Individual role demands

Worklife balance

group demands

Organizational demands

1. Cedrick tends to worry about things in his life, regardless of whats going on in his job or whether he is facing anything objectively stressful.

2. Chien-Shiung has to miss his daughters softball game because he is committed to a work meeting.

3. Lourdes works as a barista at a very busy campus Starbucks location.

4. Danilo feels anxiety every morning on his commute to work thinking about the fact that he will be spending the next 8 hours with his coworkers who are neither kind nor helpful to one another.

5. Ang manages the front desk at a New York City hotel and has to pretend that he is happy and cheerful all day long, even when customers are rude to him or his employees.

6. Norman works a full-time 8 to 5 job but also does consulting work on the side. He is stressed trying to decide whether he should take two days off from his full-time job, thus putting himself behind on tasks, in order to take advantage of a lucrative consulting opportunity.

7. Teris direct supervisor often ignores subordinates concerns, manipulates others to get ahead, and engages in unethical behavior.

8. Violetas office feels overly stimulating to her. There are too many people crammed into the space, the overhead fluorescent lighting causes her daily headaches, and there are no walls to provide any quiet or privacy for employees.

9. Ahmeds company expects its employees to be available 24 hours a day. Last week he spent the weekend hiking with friends but was on his phone responding to emails half the time. He knew that if he ignored the emails his boss would reprimand him on Monday.

10. Farrah is always on the go. She keeps a to-do list for everything, speed walks between meetings, and often feels impatient.

11. Devishas manager tends to assign projects without giving much explanation for how employees performance will be evaluated. Devisha is experiencing work stress because she has no idea whether she is performing well or not and wont be sure until her annual evaluation.

12. Philip and his spouse just adopted a baby. Philip is taking a month of paternity leave, and because of this he knows he will likely miss out on being assigned to a project that he was looking forward to working on.