PS390 Unit 9 Satisfaction and Stress Paper Example

Ninety Seconds Between Calls: A PS390 Unit 9 Job Satisfaction and Stress Paper

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

PS390: Introduction to Industrial/Organizational Psychology

Unit 9 Job Satisfaction and Stress Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer, the call center, the employees and every figure are composite and illustrative; the articles cited are real.

The Floor in Summer

Summer is the hardest season at our Charlotte customer service center. Storms knock out power across the region, call volume can triple in a day and callers are often frightened or furious. Representatives move from call to call with about ninety seconds of wrap-up time, and the scheduling system tracks adherence to the minute; a bathroom break that runs long shows up as a red mark. To adjust a bill by even five dollars, a representative must place the caller on hold and find a supervisor.

The April employee survey showed the strain. Representatives rated their workload and their control over their own time among the lowest items, and many comments described exhaustion. Turnover after the first full year was highest among representatives who had worked through the previous summer's storm season.

Pressure Without Say

Karasek (1979) argued that strain on the job comes from heavy demands paired with little decision latitude, a worker's control over how and when the work is done. Where heavy pressure met little say over the work, a pattern Karasek named high strain, people were the most worn out and unhappy; where heavy pressure came with plenty of say, the work could be demanding without doing harm.

Our representatives fit the high-strain description almost exactly. The demands were heavy and unpredictable, and control was minimal: they could not choose when to take a break, how long to spend with a distressed caller or what to offer a customer whose bill was clearly wrong.

The calls were hard, but what wore people down was having no say over anything that surrounded them.

Demands and Resources

Bakker and Demerouti (2007) extended this thinking in the job demands-resources model. Every job has demands, aspects that require sustained effort and carry physical or psychological costs, and resources, aspects that help achieve goals, reduce the costs of demands or support growth. In this model, heavy demands wear people out, while things like freedom to decide, helpful coworkers, useful feedback and room to grow keep them engaged and soften the toll the demands take.

The model widened our view of what to change. We could not reduce storm calls, but we could add resources: more control, more support and more recovery.

Does Satisfaction Matter for Performance?

Some managers argued that satisfaction was a nice-to-have, not a business priority. Judge et al. (2001) pooled hundreds of studies of satisfied and productive workers and found the two moved together moderately, more than older reviews had claimed, and more in complex work. Satisfaction is not the only driver of performance, but it is not irrelevant either. For a center losing trained representatives after their first summer, satisfaction also connects directly to turnover costs.

What Representatives Said About Control

The survey comments made the abstract models concrete. One representative wrote that the worst part of storm season was not the yelling but "being timed while someone cries at you." Another wrote that she knew exactly how to fix most billing mistakes but had to make the customer wait five minutes on hold while she found a supervisor to approve what both of them already knew was right. A third said the only way to get a Saturday off was to call in sick. None of these describes a problem that more resilience training would solve. Each describes a decision that representatives were not allowed to make about their own work. When I shared these comments with the supervisors, several admitted they found the approval requests as tiresome as the representatives did, since they spent much of each shift walking between desks to say yes.

Support From Supervisors and Peers

Resources also include people. The pulse survey showed that representatives who rated their supervisor as supportive reported less exhaustion, even on the same teams under the same call volume. We asked supervisors to spend the first ten minutes after a major storm wave walking the floor, checking on anyone who had taken a series of hard calls, and to name one specific thing each person had handled well that day.

Three Changes

With the center manager's approval, we piloted three changes on two teams for the summer.

First, a small decision authority: representatives may now issue billing credits of up to twenty-five dollars without a supervisor, for a short list of documented reasons, with every credit reviewed weekly. This gave them control over a common source of frustration for callers and for themselves.

Second, recovery time: after any call that a representative flags as abusive or emotionally difficult, they can take a five-minute break off the phones without it counting against adherence, up to three times a shift.

Third, schedule flexibility: a shift-swap board, suggested in the spring listening sessions, lets representatives trade shifts with supervisor approval within a day rather than a week.

Results From the Summer

The pilot teams reported higher ratings of control and lower exhaustion on a short monthly pulse survey than the comparison teams, though the difference was moderate and the summer was milder than the previous one. The twenty-five dollar credits averaged eleven dollars and saved supervisors many hold interruptions. Recovery breaks were used about once a shift on storm days and rarely otherwise, and they did not measurably lengthen wait times for customers in the queue. No pilot representative resigned during the summer, compared with four on the comparison teams.

Limits

The pilot was small, the teams were not randomly chosen and a milder summer may have helped. Some supervisors worried that credits would be abused; the weekly review found two questionable credits out of several hundred, both handled with a conversation rather than a penalty. A longer trial through a winter, when billing complaints peak, will show whether the effects hold in a different kind of busy season, and a larger rollout would need to check whether newer representatives use the credit authority as carefully as experienced ones.

Conclusion

Representatives faced the high-demand, low-control conditions Karasek linked to strain. Bakker and Demerouti's model pointed to adding resources rather than only cutting demands, and Judge and colleagues' findings showed that satisfaction matters for performance as well as well-being. Credit authority, recovery breaks and a shift-swap board gave the pilot teams more control, and their exhaustion and turnover improved.

References

Bakker, A. B., & Demerouti, E. (2007). The job demands-resources model: State of the art. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 22(3), 309-328. https://doi.org/10.1108/02683940710733115

Judge, T. A., Thoresen, C. J., Bono, J. E., & Patton, G. K. (2001). The job satisfaction-job performance relationship: A qualitative and quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 127(3), 376-407. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.127.3.376

Karasek, R. A., Jr. (1979). Job demands, job decision latitude, and mental strain: Implications for job redesign. Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285-308. https://doi.org/10.2307/2392498