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The intent of this research is determine the extent to which selfreported measures of fiscal condition are consistent with commonly identified measures of fiscal condition using secondary financial data. While the field of government finance has amassed a lengthy list of research on fiscal condition and fiscal stress assessment, there remains a gap in the research on the extent to which practitioners' perceptions of fiscal stress are consistent with such measures. Our results suggest that there is limited evidence of a relationship between self-reported and objective measures of fiscal condition

This chapter provides an overview of the Department of Defense (DoD) laboratory structure to help equipment designers, modelers, and manufacturers determine where research, testing programs, or relevant findings can be found. The chapter includes a discussion of the performance measures and metrics typically used in DoD laboratories and concludes by considering the current state-of-the-art as well as the state-of-the-possible for human performance measurement.

Research on workplace stress measurements varied without much accuracy and effectiveness. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new quantitative assessment tool emWave Pro Plus (Institute of HeartMath) and compare heart rate variability (HRV) results with the Personal and Organizational Quality Assessment (POQA) and the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS).

This research opted for a correlational study which involves 85 full-time employees who were working at least 40 h per week in a large corporation participated in this study. The POQA and PSS were used to correlate with HRV.

Astonishing findings emerged in this study. Significant positive correlations were found between emotional stress and HRV, and between intention to quit and HRV. In other words, the researchers have to make sense the following surprising findings: the higher the emotional stress an employee faces, the healthier they are. Healthier employees may have higher intentions of quitting their jobs. The surprising results may be attributed to personality, culture, emotional regulation and age among others.

This research fulfills an identified need to validate quantifiable stress measurements especially in a corporate environment. The research also shows promising results, and future studies should continue to tap into HRV as an objective measure of mental health and workplace stress.

This chapter aims to provide nuance into the issue of generational cohort differences at work by focusing on the role of contextual moderator variables. Theory and hypotheses derived from the research on generational differences, psychological contracts, and work values are contrasted to a countervailing set of hypotheses derived from theory and research on the confluence of age and Person-Environment (P-E) fit. Complex patterns of interactive effects are posited for both alternatives. The results favored a generational hypothesis regarding the positively valenced construct of job satisfaction but an age-based hypothesis for the negatively valenced construct of turnover intentions. Results are tested using a subset from a large and nationally representative sample of adults from the US workforce (n = 476). Results offer mixed support for both age and generational cohorts, qualified by the specific type of outcome at hand.

In the context of a staff development programme, the relationships between work‐related stress, staff support and job satisfaction were explored among staff groups in two residential assessment and treatment facilities for people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour. Although overall support was relatively high for both formal and informal supports, only the informal supports from colleagues were negatively correlated with ratings of work‐related stress. Work‐related stress and job satisfaction were shown to be independent factors, and thus levels of stress could not be inferred from overall ratings of job satisfaction, or vice versa. The study identified a potentially vulnerable group of staff who reported relatively high job satisfaction but also some degree of stress.

The intent here is to present a representative, though not exhaustive, review of some recent empirical and theoretical literature on stress and the management of stress in occupational settings. The paper begins with a synopsis of the financial cost to the employer of unchecked excessive levels of employee stress. The next section reviews some examples of empirically‐based research supporting the clinical and cost effectiveness of current Occupational Stress Management (OSM) programmes. This is followed by a discussion of recent evidence showing that the “traditional” (corporate) approach to OSM is incomplete and insufficient. Towards the end of the article, an idealised, comprehensive, biopsychosocioecological transactional model of OSM is outlined. Finally, methodological limitations of traditional OSM programmes are discussed, and it is suggested that future studies might consider utilising a multilevel‐multimethod “triangulation” measurement approach.

Personality traits such as anxiety, self‐esteem and aggressive hostility are often thought to affect the stress that a person perceives or manifests. With data from 176 male executives, this study suggests that there are indirect and interacting relationships between personality and general health. This article proposes a cybernetic framework that links personality with other variables in understanding overall health. The framework specifies that personal characteristics (i.e. age), personality, and environment all play a role, each interacting systemically. The framework provides a basis for illustrating these interactions. For example, while type A personalities are more likely to get involved in more stressful situations, their negative health effects might depend on other variables, such as self‐esteem and years in the job. While personality features are important risk factors, they may not, by themselves, predict stress. Stress is the result of interacting variables including age, position, job level, the stress experience, and one's personality.

Strategic decisions leaders make involving organizational changes such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A), divestitures, and downsizing, which can influence and/or interact with other organizational factors. For example, within the context of M&A, changes impact financial performance, firm behaviors, and organizational culture. In addition, strategic decisions for these types of change can also interrelate with other more intrapersonal factors, including both leaders’ and employees’ health and well-being. Employee stress, also referred to as “merger syndrome,” outlines individual negative impacts of the changes including, but not limited to, cynicism and distrust, change wariness, and burnout, all accumulating to psychological effects including increases in detachment to work, stress, and sick leave. In this chapter, the authors outline the different impacts M&A phases have on stress and well-being and how they interrelate with the strategic decisions leaders make. The authors also outline future research opportunities and practical implications for how leaders and employees could better manage future major changes such as M&A activities.

The authors present a quantitative analysis of the effect that organizational change has on work stress, work attitudes and perceptions, and cognitive utilization in a task.

First, the authors study the role organizational change has on work stress, attitudes and perceptions, including the role of attitudes toward change. The authors do so by examining differences across employees who are and are not undergoing change, as well as across two change phases. Second, the authors take advantage of the ongoing organizational change to study how people's anxiety about such change affects their cognitive utilization. They use an innovative approach to measure attention disengagement in a cognitive utilization task – a proxy for task-related performance – through a letter detection exercise. Third, the authors examine the role of work stress and change-related anxiety on attention disengagement among employees undergoing change. For this test, they use two organizational change-related texts to function as an anxiety-inducing and a calming-inducing prime.

Organization change is associated with higher work stress, lower job satisfaction and perceptions of institutional effectiveness and support. Further, organizational change-related anxiety adversely affects cognitive utilization, showing that employees undergoing change have higher attention disengagement relative to those not experiencing change. Among employees undergoing change, those receiving an anxiety-inducing prime show better cognitive utilization (lower attention disengagement) than those receiving the calming-inducing prime.

The rare merger of two public universities provides a natural experiment and a source of exogenous variation to examine the effects of radical organizational change on employees' attitudes, perceptions and task performance.

The aim of this study is to draw on various models of burnout and test hypotheses relating to anticipated differences in the burnout process between inbound versus outbound call centre agents. This is achieved by comparing the magnitude of the relationships in the sequence of customer stressors → emotional exhaustion → depersonalization → reduced personal accomplishment across a sample of inbound and outbound call centre agents working in a large retail bank call centre in New Zealand.

Data were collected from inbound and outbound call centre agents of a large retail bank call centre in New Zealand via a self‐administered survey questionnaire electronically distributed to all 195 call centre agents working in the bank's two call centre locations. Data obtained from the call centre agents were analysed using the SEM‐based partial least squares (PLS) methodology.

The findings of the study reveal significant differences between inbound and outbound call centre agents in terms of the extent to which emotional exhaustion impacts depersonalisation as well as the extent to which depersonalisation influences feelings of reduced personal accomplishment.

The research advances understanding of differences in the burnout process as perceived by inbound versus outbound call centre agents. Call centre management might consider improving the work environment to bring about greater job discretion/autonomy, greater job variety and performance monitoring in order to attenuate the stronger impact of these relationships in an inbound context.

These findings extend our understanding of these phenomena in the largely unexplored yet important context of call centre agent‐customer interaction in specifically highlighting differences between inbound and outbound call centre agent burnout.