May 26, 2008
High performance and employee well-being, are they compatible?
Interview with Professor Ivan T. Robertson
Mihaela Chraif
EJOP Editor
&
Sorop Diana
undergraduate student
Professor Robertson is Managing Director of Robertson Cooper Ltd (a university spin-off company with offices in Manchester, London and Sydney - providing products and services to help organisations build resilience, high levels of psychological well-being and sustainable high performance: www.robertsoncooper.com).
Well-Being is the key source of higher levels of performance and competitiveness for organizations.
If employees have a strong sense of purpose and well-being, research shows that they will perform at higher levels. If employees feel better they are likely to work harder and take fewer days off sick. People with higher levels of psychological well-being learn and solve problems more effectively, are more enthusiastic about change, relate to others more positively and accept new challenges more readily.
The concept of well-being is about ensuring that staff members are sufficiently challenged by goals and sufficiently supported in achieving them. This concept of Psychological Well-Being holds much more value for working life than popular conceptions of well-being and can deliver huge benefits for employees and organisations alike. It is often the missing ingredient in moving an organisation to the next level.
Organisations where a state of positive well-being is the norm have happy, healthy, high performing staff. Well-being is achieved when pressure is positive, because this way the workforce is energised and engaged, rather than stressed. Well-being is not just the absence of stress - it is created when people are willing and able to give their best with a clear sense of purpose. Well-being is maximised when staff feel in control and able to meet their work demands.
Well-being isn’t just a desirable state; it is an essential one for sustainable high performance and business growth. People with high levels of well-being learn and problems solve more effectively, accept challenge and change more readily, and relate to others more positively.
EJOP: Professor Robertson, what can you tell us about the organization level’s impact of psychological wee-being?
Prof. Robertson: I suppose that you mean all that differentiates between people’s psychological well-being and the organizational level they work at.
Lots of studies show that the people at higher levels in the organization generally have higher levels of psychological well-being, compared with the people from low levels.
It seems the most likely reason for that is that one of the big factors in determining well-being is the level of autonomy and control that people have, and people from higher levels in the organization simply have more control and autonomy in their work.
EJOP: What can you tell us about threat pressure and challenge, or challenge versus threat pressure?
Prof. Robertson: Ok, I suppose it’s a very simple distinction. Challenge pressure is something that motivates when people feel it is matched with their ability, but, all depends on how the individual sees it.
Of course the same requirement or the same request or the same pressure can be seen differently by two different people, one can see the challenge and the other the threat.
The critical difference regarding challenge pressure is made by what you think, if you could respond effectively or not. A threat pressure is not something you could control and solve anyway, sow it’s just something bad that could happen and you are not able to respond effectively anyway; a threat pressure can’t be exciting and psychological healthy.
EJOP: What about pressure and mental toughness?
Prof. Robertson: Well, that’s more difficult to say anything really conclusive about, but there is some work being done at the moment by various researchers where they are experimenting with the idea looking to test the hypotheses that small amounts of quite intense pressure can help to build people’s resilience and mental toughness and their capability to cope with future situations, but I think it’s premature really, on the basis of the evidence, to be able to draw a really firm conclusion, because of course a pressure that damages and that you don’t respond to effectively is probably going to damage your resilience, your mental toughness and your self applicancy, so I think it’s an interesting area of work and intuitively it makes sense to me. You expose yourself to a really difficult challenge and if you cope with it then it’s building your capability to cope with it again.
EJOP: Professor Robertson what can you tell us about pressure at the workplace?
Prof. Robertson: It’s the same in the UK, and it’s the same kind of sectors, it’s in the law and some of the financial services areas. I think there are a number of points. One is that although different people cope with different kinds of pressure more or less effectively, it is fundamentally true some people just are overall more resilient that others, so there are people who can cope with all kinds of pressure more effectively. Having good coping strategies, one of the big things that matters is having active coping strategies that enable you to deal with those sources of pressure. So somebody is working in those kinds of organisations, it feels like a reward to justifying the efforts and to have good coping strategies and have high levels of resilience. Maybe it’s not too damaging as far as they’re concerned, but there are two problems though. One of them is that it’s only the most resilient where it won’t be doing damage and some people probably don’t recognize just how serious the damage that’s being done. The second is that when people go through the experience themselves they’re more inclined to then create a culture and working environment where they expect others to have to be put through the same rights of initiation or the same working cultures and practices and that can be very damaging to people who do find it more difficult to cope. So it’s generating a culture that’s fundamentally unhealthy and unnecessary, actually as well.
EJOP: What can you tell us about the relationship between pressure and performance?
Prof. Robertson: Actually it’s simple, if pressure is too low, performance is unlikely to be very good because the tension won’t be focused, the effort won’t be focused so probably you get very low levels of performance. If pressure is increased to the point where a person feel that he/she can cope, then performance is probably going to be quite good, but if pressure keeps on increasing, then eventually performance will deteriorate so you get the classic inverted U shape, where pressure is in the middle range producing high levels of performance, but if you increase pressure it folds up and you slide down the other side.
EJOP: And about the relationship between satisfaction and pressure?
Prof. Robertson: That one I’m struggling a bit with, actually. I would hypothesize that might be evidence towards this but I’m not sure to be honest. I would suspect it behaves in a very similar way to the performance link, so low levels of pressure it would be very difficult to feel satisfied and good about a job where you don’t feel you’re under much pressure at all and it’s literally too easy. If you reach a point where you feel that the pressure is so great that you can’t perform, then deriving your satisfaction from it is going to be very difficult. But we do know of course that there is a positive relation between performance of job satisfactions, so it’s probably going to follow the same shade as the pressure performance cope.
EJOP: In the end reveal us few differences between psychological well being and happiness…
Prof Robertson: I think really in the same ways, there isn’t very much difference, but in most of the ways, it’s about the ways of measuring weather a difference is. So most of the happiness scales that I’m aware of actually require people to make a cognitive appraisal of how they feel about their life and the things that have happened to them. So essentially it’s a cognitive act where people are praising their emotional state. Psychological well being I think is a bit more direct and a bit hotter, so it’s about your emotional feelings here and now, or in a recent period of time, like weeks or months and how you’re reacting to it and how you’re feeling, more literally about that rather than making an appraisal for your feelings from a cognitive point of view. I think if you look at the happiness scales, they do actually measure different things from the psychological well being scales, clearly they’re very closely related anyways.