The Art of Compassionate Business, 2nd Edition

Appendix A: Stress and Business Activities

When we overwork, we under-enjoy.

Susan Jeffers

Looker and Gregson (2010) state that stress is a “mismatch between perceived demands and perceived ability to cope,” which implies that a person has too many demands or too few resources to deal with those demands. Sometimes, stress can also stem from few demands, even though this is less common. In other words, stress is a person’s defensive response to a perceived threat from the environment.

Stressed people appraise that they will not be capable of dealing with the stress factors effectively. Csikszentmihalyi (2002, 2003) states that workers are more prone to become stressed when the level of work required from them is highly challenging as compared ...