Sense of identity protects emergency workers from stress
Thursday 10 September 2009
Many work teams operate under substantial stress as an integral part of what they do. Work teams such as A&E, drug squads, firearms, the military and fire-fighters do so with utmost efficiency and effectiveness, and without any greater likelihood of personal distress than in other less stressful jobs. How do they manage this?
Latest research conducted by Dr Lynne J Millward from the University of Surrey highlights the important role played by team identification in the coping process: the stronger the sense of shared team identity the more equipped the team is in being able to offset the impact of stress on its integrity as a team, as well as on personal well-being.
To look more closely at this process, 232 fire-fighters from across one UK County, completed questionnaires in which they responded to high and low stressor (fire and traffic) scenarios, against various psychological indicators. The findings showed (irrespective of whether individual fire-fighters were predisposed to be anxious), that when responding to high stressor scenarios, high team identification heightened the extent to which teams felt confident in their ability to handle the situation, reduced the likelihood of coping by personal withdrawal and also reduced the degree to which they reported feeling anxious and uncertain. Team identification was also associated with a reduced likelihood that personal anxiety impacted on team confidence. Overall, the findings suggest that team identification can help to promote team and personal well-being especially under conditions of high stress.
Dr Millward comments:: “The bulk of research on work-related stress is focused on individual coping strategies, and is largely oriented to what has gone wrong, rather than what is working well. The power of social support to buffer stress has long been recognised but not in the form of group memberships. The potential of the team - as a particular type of work group, to alleviate collective and individual stress may account in part for why many emergency workers cope so well with daily stressors that on an individual level could otherwise become highly debilitating. On a practical level, this research shows that working as a team member as opposed to a lone individual, is not only good for performance but can facilitate coping in situations that could otherwise individually be quite overwhelming. Teams are a relatively untapped and low cost source of leverage for stress management in the workplace.”
The research will be presented at the British Science Festival on Thursday 10 September, between 11-30 and 12 noon.
