A multilevel review of stressor research in teams

Abstract

The contemporary work environment is characterized by an ongoing trend to embed employees in teams because of their expected abilities for handling complex tasks and integrating diverse sets of knowledge and skills. However, leveraging this potential is endangered by stimuli within and outside of teams that take a toll on cohesion and teamwork among team members. Understanding the role that stressors and demands play in the work-related functioning of teams and their members is therefore an increasingly important challenge in the organizational behavior literature.Whereas research on stressors and demands has primarily focused on the individual level, we expand the research scope by considering these phenomena to be multilevel. We perform an interdisciplinary review of the literature on these stimuli in teams and show how related research, such as that on destructive leadership, may benefit from a more balanced account and integration of frameworks on stressors.Our multilevel review is informative for the literature on stressors and demands at the individual and team levels, as it offers an important conceptual grounding for how and why various stimuli in this social environment differentially influence both the collective entity and its individual team members.

Beyond the individual: A systematic review of the effects of unit-level demands and resources on employee productivity, health, and well-being.

“…A previous review on stressors on team outcomes (Razinskas & Hoegl, 2020) and a review of the relationship between multiple levels of resources and well-being and productivity (Nielsen et al, 2017) highlighted the importance of considering the supraindividual level. Other reviews have focused on one supraindividual level, such as teams and groups (Balkundi & Harrison, 2006; Razinskas & Hoegl, 2020) or the organization (Van De Voorde et al, 2012). To integrate and further our understanding of job demands and job resources as workplace factors that affect individual employee outcomes, we consider them at the supraindividual level and include all examples of supraindividual levels: teams, groups, units, leaders, departments, and organizations.…”

“…Still, many studies and literature reviews focus solely on demands or resources. For example, Razinskas and Hoegl (2020) reviewed the extant literature on stress stimuli in teams, with a special focus on multilevel relationships. However, the authors focused only on stressors, which limits the work environment to negative factors threatening employee well-being.…”

The emergence of resilience: Recovery trajectories in sleep functioning after a major stressor.

“…Stressors are events that pose heightened risk to optimal functioning because they tax people’s resources in ways that may exceed their available reservoirs (Cohen et al, 2019). In occupational settings, stressors include events such as imposed organizational change, bullying, occupational health and safety issues, and co-worker conflicts, just to name a few (Cooper et al, 2001; Ganster & Rosen, 2013; Razinskas & Hoegl, 2020). It is well known that stress—an experiential state where the demands of the situation exceed our available resources to cope sufficiently with them (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984)—is often detrimental for psychological, physical, and social functioning (e.g., Bonde, 2008; Eddy et al, 2017; Starcke & Brand, 2016).…”

Is Paternalistic Leadership a Double-Edged Sword for Team Performance? The Mediation of Team Identification and Emotional Exhaustion

“…Zadow et al (2017) explained how psychosocial safety climate relates to physical and psychological workplace injuries via emotional exhaustion at the team level. Collectively, emotional exhaustion can be properly examined at either the individual level or the team level (e.g., Catherine & Huang, 2011; Razinskas & Hoegl, 2020). The conservation of resources theory suggests that when team workers become exhausted from dealing with excessive unfavorable leadership, they are unlikely to perform well due to their depleted energy resources (Bakker et al, 2008).…”