Search results

The Stress Arousal Scale (SAS; Everly, Sherman, & Smith, 1989) is a 20-item psychometric instrument designed to measure cognitive–affective precipitators of the physiological stress response. The SAS has been utilized in a number of studies that have examined various relations between stress arousal and its antecedents and consequences in the accounting work environment. This study introduces a new version of this scale, the SAS4, developed based on the Perseverative Cognition Hypothesis (Brosschot, Gerin, & Thayer, 2006). It is hypothesized that this new scale has internal consistency, test–retest reliability, and both convergent and divergent validity as well as significant correlation with the balance of the items on the original scale. These predictions are tested with a sample of American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) members employed in public accounting, and four independent samples of undergraduate business students. The results indicate that the SAS4 is a valid and reliable psychometric measure with potential benefits in terms of its congruence with recent theoretical and empirical advances in the etiology of stress, as well as its administrative efficiency for those seeking to further examine the stress dynamic among accountants in the workplace.

Job performance in the US Army is a complex construct, in part because of the stressors that soldiers face, both day-to-day and during deployment. This chapter critically reviews job performance, and the connections between performance and stress and health, discussing how findings may also be relevant within the specific context of the Army. We review established conceptualizations and metrics of job performance within the Army as well as the civilian sector. Then, we discuss the existing research on the associations between performance and stress, physical health, health behaviors, and mental health. Considering these findings, we discuss lessons learned for Army performance metrics, recommending that stress- and health-related issues be incorporated into unit and leader performance metrics, with two critical caveats: (1) data are aggregated at a company level and (2) non-reactive measures are used. Finally, we discuss how existing data repositories can facilitate future research and note potential constraints of using secondary data.

This paper examines the influence of stress arousal and burnout as mediators of the negative relations between role stressors and job outcomes (satisfaction, performance, and turnover intentions) among a sample of AICPA members working in public accounting. It extends prior research which examined these linkages (Chong & Monroe, 2015; Fogarty, Singh, Rhoads, & Moore, 2000; Smith, Davy, & Everly, 2007) by evaluating a model that simultaneously incorporates stress arousal and the three fundamental dimensions of burnout, i.e., emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment. This paper also utilizes a recently validated stress arousal measure designed to capture the worry and rumination aspects of arousal posited to be responsible for a number of negative personal outcomes.

The results indicate that role stressors, mediated by stress arousal and the individual burnout dimensions, have a negative influence on job outcomes. In line with predictions regarding the temporal ordering of stress arousal and burnout in the model, each of the job stressors had a significant positive influence on accountants’ stress arousal, and the influence of the individual role stressors on each burnout dimension was either partially or fully mediated via their relations with stress arousal. In turn, the influence of stress arousal on each of the job outcomes was either partially or fully mediated through its relations with emotional exhaustion.

Human performance, particularly that of the warfighter, has been the subject of a large amount of research during the past few decades. For example, in the Medline database of medical and psychological research, 1,061 papers had been published on the topic of “military performance” as of October 2003. Because warfighters are often pushed to physiological and mental extremes, a study of their performance provides a unique glimpse of the interplay of a wide variety of intrinsic and extrinsic factors on the functioning of the human brain and body. Unfortunately, it has proven very difficult to build performance models that can adequately incorporate the myriad of physiological, medical, social, and cognitive factors that influence behavior in extreme conditions. The chief purpose of this chapter is to provide a neurobiological (neurochemical) framework for building and integrating warfighter performance models in the physiological, medical, social, and cognitive areas. This framework should be relevant to all other professionals who routinely operate in extreme environments. The secondary purpose of this chapter is to recommend various performance metrics that can be linked to specific neurochemical states and can accordingly strengthen and extend the scope of the neurochemical model.

Tourism in the wake of films, literature, and music is gaining interest among academics and practitioners alike. Despite the significance of converging tourism and media production and popcultural consumption, theorizing in this field is weak. This chapter explores complex relationships among popcultural phenomena, destination image creation, and tourism consumption. By taking a broader social science approach, it revisits and connects research themes, such as symbolic consumption, negotiated representations, fans and fandom, technology mediation, and media convergence. The chapter concludes with an integrative model, or “popcultural placemaking loop,” which is qualified through six propositions.

After a vigorous debate in the late 1970s, the sociology of emotion put aside most discussion of whether or not the physiological arousal associated with emotion labels is differentiated. Since this early period, scholars have made great progress on two fronts. First, theories about the interrelationship of identity, action and emotion have specified a family of new concepts related to emotion. Second, a large corpus of research on the physiological correlates of emotional experience emerged. In this chapter, we review the well-developed control theories of identity and emotion, and focus on the key concepts that might relate to different physiological states. We then review the general classes of physiological measures, discussing their reliability, intrusiveness and other features that might determine their usefulness for tracking responses to social interaction. We then offer a highly provisional mapping of physiological measures onto the concepts that they might potentially measure, given past research about how these physiological processes relate to environmental stimuli. While any linkage between concepts and measures must be speculative at this point, we hope that this review will serve as a stimulus to theoretically guided research that begins to assess the validity of these new measures for sociological use.

Considerable progress has been made over the past 20 years toward the construction of a global stress paradigm for accountants in the workplace. Over this time period, a number of antecedents and consequences of personal and organizational stress have been identified and empirically verified. These efforts have provided the foundation for future investigations, which will likely provide additional guidance to those seeking to implement strategies aimed at enhancing individual well-being and organizational efficiency. This chapter synthesizes the findings of these studies to construct a model of the stress dynamic among accountants aimed at guiding future efforts designed to refine our understanding of this critical phenomenon.

This chapter combines quantitative studies of the connections between stressors and performance in accounting settings and identifies the mediators and moderators of stressors–performance relationships. Using meta-analyses and path analyses, this research compiles 72 studies to investigate the relationships of stressors with accountant and auditor performance. As hypothesized, bivariate meta-analyses results indicate that work-related stressors negatively affect performance, and burnout and stress are negatively related to performance, whereas motivation is positively related to performance. Moreover, a meta-analytical structural equation modeling indicates that role stressors have significant direct and indirect effects (through burnout and stress) on job performance. Accumulation of multiple samples through meta-analysis bolsters statistical power compared to single-sample studies and thus reveals the sign of residual direct effects of role stressors on job performance in accounting settings.

Purpose: In this chapter we examine the emotional experience and identity of sustainability change agents and advance understanding of their emotion management strategies. We explore how sustainability change agents experience, manage, and respond to the negative emotions that arise in the course of their jobs. Study Design: We took a mixed-method and multimodal approach to answer our research questions. Using a narrative approach, we collected data using in-depth narrative interviews and supplemented this with quantitative measurement of participants' heart rate and sweat response during the interviews. Findings: Our results confirm that sustainability change agency is an emotionally laden profession. Furthermore, we found that sustainability change agents use three different coping mechanisms including emotion-focused coping (EFC) (“rational avoiders”), problem-focused coping (PFC) (“committed go-getters”), and meaning-focused coping (MFC) (“green philosophers”). Originality: Our research shows that sustainability change agents experienced strong negative emotions in relation to their jobs and they employed one of the three coping styles: EFC, PFC, or MFC. We found that MFC was an isolated cognitive appraisal style, rather than a form of EFC. These findings provide a starting point for further work to help sustainability change agents avoid potential burnout and continue to contribute to the future health of the planet while at the same time maintain their personal well-being.