It is often the case that managers confronted with a stressed member of their team can’t figure out why others in their team are not also suffering from stress. The stress response is dependent upon what is described as ‘cognitive appraisal’.
The reaction of an individual depends on how a person interprets or appraises (consciously or unconsciously) the significance of a harmful, threatening or challenging event and whether one has the resources to cope with it. A whole range of different factors, including past experiences and personality, influences the appraisal. The reason cognitive appraisal is important in understanding the causes of stress is because it means that stress is in the eye of the beholder. Evaluating stress, therefore, needs to take into account what the beholder believes to be a threat and whether he or she believes they can cope with the situation.
It is for this reason that subjective evaluations of stress such as those found in standardised stress indicators are more successful in identifying stress problems than gross data such as absence rates, accident rates, or attrition rates. Measurement of stressors must be a measure of the perception of a threat by the individual
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