We examine the concept of role demands and desires and the ways in which we become overloaded by competition among the various expectations others have of us. We describe several helpful tactics for handling (if not eliminating) the stress we feel including flight (seldom desirable), selective ignorance (easier for some than others), responding to power (a favorite of office politicians), responding to legitimacy (the bureaucrat's salvation), compartmentalizing responses (the time manager's favorite), modifying demands (the courageous hero's approach), and changing your desires (the advice of many religious seers).
To provide concrete examples of role overload and life stress, let's first look at two young, dual-career couples whose success appears to be creating new problems.
Love in the Air
Robert Goldman and Sylvia Garfeln: Sylvia was the only daughter of a successful New York physician. Her mother was a mathematics teacher in a Manhattan high school. Sylvia was pushed to excel; she did; and she enjoyed it. After attending the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, she entered M.I.T. where she majored in chemistry, graduating magna cum laude. Her focus was medicine from the beginning, so she worked part time and summers in a Boston hospital. Her parents missed her but supported her independence and ambition. All this drive left her little time for social life, platonic or romantic. The family was disappointed when Sylvia was rejected for admission to Harvard Medical School, but she persevered by working full time for a year in a research laboratory (earning an M.S. in biochemistry along the way). She so enjoyed the process of experimental research that she considered going on for a Ph.D. However, on her second round of applications, she was accepted to Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in New York City. During her fourth year in medical school, she met Robert Goldman.
Goldman was somewhat older than his fellow students at Columbia's Graduate School of Business. He had also grown up in New York, but his parents had operated a grocery store in Queens. He had attended City University of New York, majoring in accounting because it seemed to offer the best promise of secure employment. It did, but he hated it. He felt that the firm treated him like a child with its rules and procedures that drained the auditors of any discretion. After three years, he left to start his own wholesale food business. He loved being his own boss and even enjoyed the early morning hours. But his ambitions seemed to outreach his business knowledge, so Goldman decided to study for an MBA (while still running his business). During his second year he met Sylvia.
It was not love at first sight, but a kind of instant old friendship that sometimes springs up between two mature people who have had little time in the past for such a relationship. Although their childhoods in New York had been different, they shared the city and the commonality exceeded the difference. Both Robert and Sylvia were a bit surprised when they decided to get married before living together. At ages thirty-one and twenty-seven, respectively, they felt quaintly old-fashioned.
Careers and marriage went well for the first two years. Sylvia interned at Mount Sinai Hospital and Robert built his wholesale business along with other New York ventures. Last year, however, Sylvia was offered an opportunity as senior resident at Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston with an instructorship at Harvard Medical School. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that both Sylvia and Robert reluctantly agreed she should take. They vowed to visit whenever possible and they have, although somewhat less than anticipated. About one weekend in three Sylvia gets to New York or Robert to Boston. Unfortunately, the sometimes long and unpredictable hours in their careers make planning difficult.
Sylvia comments on the situation
"I love my work and I still get a thrill walking into the Harvard Medical School building. In the beginning I was having panic attacks because I didn't know what to do. My lab director just left me alone so I had to figure out what I was to explore. For a while I suffered a kind of writer's block; I just couldn't get started after all those years of jumping through the hoops that others held up for me. But gradually I was able to focus on my own coherent project involving sensitive gene splicing. Did I tell you, I've been made an assistant professor? And Dr. Stromberg, he won the Nobel Prize three years ago remember, he's asked me to join his research team. I will be operating on the frontier of genetic theory. There's no limit to where it can lead-the people who can be helped, the parental grief prevented. It's great, but I do wish my husband would move up here. I love Boston. It's so much more civilized than New York. We could get an apartment in Cambridge near the river. We could certainly afford it. We must be making well over $100,000 per year between us. So far, he refuses even to discuss the possibility. Even my parents are angry at me."
Robert comments
"I can't leave New York. I'm a New Yorker. Sylvia can operate in Cambridge, but I can't. She has a thing about Harvard and M.I.T. They make her feel like Abigail Adams or something. I feel like a foreigner. And, sometimes I think Sylvia's associates snicker at my accent. I'm treated like Mr. Garfein. Besides, my businesses are here; they can't just be moved. And 1 won't allow someone else to run them. That's how companies get ruined and owners robbed. Someday I'll have the biggest food brokerage firm in the city. I know it. I've backed Sylvia; I've cooked the meals; I've cleaned the apartment-or I did when she lived here. Now I eat out mainly and the place is a mess. I'm going to be thirty-five years old soon. I'm too old to be living as a bachelor. I'm in no hurry to have children, but we can't wait forever. And Sylvia's parents are getting older. They need her too."
Louise O'Brien and Mark Grazia: Louise and Mark have been married since senior year at the University of Illinois. Both worked for a year in Chicago after graduation. Mark was disappointed in his work in a bank, however, and decided to get an MBA. Louise more or less decided to apply also, although she wasn't really sure that she was committed to a serious career. Since they were both good students with valuable work experience, they were both accepted to the Kellogg School at Northwestern University. Between part-time work, family support, and loans, they survived. Louise had to take a semester off to have an unplanned child, but Mark became an adept father, able to split chores. One or the other appearing at school with the baby in a backpack was not unknown.
After graduation, Louise accepted a position with the Chicago-based national account office of a major consulting firm. Mark had already started with a large accounting firm as a tax specialist. Once again, the sharing and parental help assisted them in bearing the burden of child-rearing and business travel. They set up a system whereby if they weren't both home, each weekend Louise would fly to wherever Mark was or vice versa. The one coming from Chicago would bring their son. Unfortunately, the travel has proved to be more than either anticipated.
Mark comments on the situation
"I'm getting tired! And my mother worries that I'm too thin. All this flying around with Kevin is ridiculous. He's almost four now and will have to go to school soon. Besides, we must spend $20,000 a year on airplane tickets just to be together. I know it would mean a big income loss, but I think Louise should get a local job where she can stay put and we can begin a normal life. To tell you the truth, I could do better in my job if I had more support from Louise. I've heard that you can tell a dual-career marriage by looking in the refrigerator. It's empty while the freezer is full. That certainly describes our home! Anyway, we'd save on the airline fares."
Louise comments
"Mark wants me to quit my job. I guess I will. Life at work has really been a pain lately. Oh, everyone thinks highly of me, but that's part of the problem. All sorts of senior and junior partners want me to work on their projects and I usually say yes because many of them are exciting. But sometimes they bump into each other. For the last six months my major assignment has been analyzing regional competition and customer attitudes for a large food company. Frank Contaldo is the partner in charge and he is a real star, a bit compulsive in his work demands and single mindedness, but I've never had any trouble with him-at least not until two weeks ago when I wasn't around when he needed someone to fill in for him at a meeting in New York. I was in Los Angeles participating in a sales pitch on a new project that Aubrey Bedford (the consulting firm's managing partner) was trying to sell. Aub has been kind of an informal mentor for me and I just couldn't disappoint him because he has grown comfortable with me assisting on these presentations. Then last week, out of the blue, one of the largest computer manufacturers called the office and asked for me personally to come out and talk about a possible project the next day. They had heard about me from a recently acquired small software firm for whom I had done some work a year ago. It was really flattering, but I had to ask for a two-week postponement of the meeting because I was just so tied up with Frank's work. I must have set a company record for billable hours this month!
In all of this Mark has been a real support, but now he wants me to quit this job because Kevin must enter kindergarten next year. I worry that I'll be bored at home or that I'll settle for some lousy job just to fill up my time. It would be a waste of my MBA and I really worry that years from now I'll blame Mark for my not making partner (at the consulting firm). Still, it would be nice to wake up in the same bed every morning!"
How much can People Do?
Our fledgling "thirty something" foursome are deeply enmeshed in the complexity of modern, dual-career life. By dint of great commitment and hard work, they are apparently achieving all of the goals which they set for themselves: valuable academic education and degrees, challenging work with prestigious firms, and attractive remuneration. But the burdens of "having it all" are becoming excessive and both couples are experiencing great strain. Clearly they have shared family burdens to a greater extent than in traditional families, but however modern they feel themselves to be, they (the men especially) are beginning to long for a more "normal" life style-which shapes up as having the wife sacrifice something in her career to give priority to family.
Louise is particularly tempted by an opportunity to simplify her life because of the role stress built into her job. Because of her past good performance, she receives multiple, uncoordinated offers from various partners to become involved in their projects. The assignments are interesting and because she wants to impress her seniors, Louise finds herself overburdened with competing demands-and runs the risk of committing the most heinous of crimes in consulting: missing a promised deadline or barely making it with shoddy work. However attractive the possibility of getting out of the rat race Louise fears that dropping out will make it impossible to ever return to the fast track with its possibility of making partner.
Sylvia Garfein, however, loves virtually everything about her job. The prestige of association is great, the money adequate, the environment pleasing and, most important, the work offers enormous potential for aiding people. To her, medicine is a real calling-and pressed deeply, she might well feel that what she is doing for mankind is more important than what her husband Robert Goldman is doing with his several entrepreneurial ventures.
Our four careerists are not alone in feeling the pressures of work and their own aspirations. A Harris poll illustrated the decline in leisure time in the United States (for example, hours per week available for leisure-time activities not including sleep, household chores, and work):
The consistency of this fall reflects the entry of women into the workplace, the expansion of dual-career couples, the increase in single-parent households and a general increase in the work year for Americans because of intensified foreign competition and staff reductions. Among the major industrialized nations, the United States appears to be second only to Japan in an employee's hours worked per year (well ahead of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany). And the United States is the only one of these countries where the work year has increased.
No miracles exist to eliminate the stress felt by our four brave souls, but tactics are available for managing role and life stress which we consider after presenting some role theory.
The Concept of Role
Every person in an organization is expected by his or her superiors, peers, subordinates, and others to behave in certain ways called role demands. These demands are made by various people with whom we work and live--those role partners who collectively comprise one's role set. These expectations often are not identical to what we perceive or desire the role to be. Our actual behavior or role performance reflects a reconciliation of our desires and others' demands. To all those in our role set, our effectiveness depends on how closely our behavior meets their demands. Our role satisfaction, however, depends on how closely behavior fits our role desire.
Conflict between Desire and Demands, if a person's characteristics are largely unsuited to role demands, he or she is likely to experience frustration leading to dissatisfaction, reduced commitment, and eventually poorer performance. Hence, a quiet, passive, contemplative person may heartily dislike the pace and initiative required in sales. Or the achievement-oriented, hard driver may have difficulty teaching when student progress is so slow and ambiguous that little performance feedback is received.
Most people are unhappy when they are misassigned so that position demands are mostly outside his or her capacity. An example is the mythical misassignment of military personnel: the civilian truck driver is assigned to the mess hall as cook; the former restaurant chef is ordered to become a radio operator; the former television repairer is sent to the motor pool as a driver, and so on (actually, the modern Army generally strives to match people and positions).
Insufficient Resources
Wanting to meet the demands upon you and feeling confident that you have the personal capacity to do so can be particularly frustrated by insufficient resources, inadequate power, and persistent failure. In telemarketing, for example, those unwelcome calls that always seem to interrupt your dinner are rejected perhaps 85 percent of the time with a "no," "don't call again," and unprintable oaths. It can be rough on the callers (assuming they are real humans and not a computer), especially when they feel the same way about being interrupted.7 Not surprisingly, turnover is extremely high.
Lack of time, money, material, or people are all well-known causes of frustration. Of increasing importance in personal feelings of stress and hopelessness is the inability to get the information needed to act. Not being able to access the required files or get meetings with appropriate people tends to breed feelings of powerlessness and anger which often find outlet in "bossism" toward those people unfortunate enough to have you as a superior.
Inadequate Demand
When a position's demands are small compared with your capacity, you become bored rather quickly. This is the familiar stereotype of the narrowly defined and programmed blue-collar production job (which many college students take as summer jobs and find excruciatingly boring). Many young college graduates also find their first professional positions unchallenging. For example, some firms have graduate engineers performing tasks that don't draw on their analytical skills and could be performed by lesser-educated technicians (if they were available).
Demand Overload
Even the best of us can find ourselves in a situation where the demands exceed our capacity to respond. You may feel that you have already been there because in 1988 21.5 percent of all college freshmen reported feeling overwhelmed by all they had to do--the highest recorded in the twenty-three years of the survey. The popular Peter Principle suggests that everyone eventually suffers this fate by rising to the level of our incompetence-that is, based on good performance that meets demands we are promoted up the ladder until we reach a post where we can't meet the demands so we are no longer promotable." There we plateau. The popularity of the concept suggests that it has some validity, but most of us probably use the "principle" to explain our superior's problems, not our own. Besides, we can grow when confronted by excessive demands. Harry S. Truman perhaps rose to the level of his incompetence, but to the surprise of most critics he then developed into a competent (perhaps even outstanding) president. Somewhere there is a job that is bigger than almost all of us, but it is not necessarily in our hierarchy, and we do not necessarily reach it.
Contradictory Demands from One Source
The dual role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in Robert Louis Stevenson's tale is an actor's dream. It is a challenge to portray the dual facets of a person's character, but in the horror story the facets are displayed sequentially, not simultaneously. Unfortunately, sometimes we are under simultaneous conflicting demands. The demands may call for behaviors that are impossible to combine. Mother expects little David to keep clean, straighten his room, study his homework, practice the piano, play with his friends, and take out the garbage-all between 4:00 and 5:00 PM.
Colleges frequently hire senior students as dormitory advisers expected to live with underclassmen, be friends and advisers to them, act as social leaders, be communication links to the administration, and en-forcers of university regulations outlawing, say, underage drinking. However, it is virtually impossible to be both friend and police officer. Being too conscientious in the latter role can destroy the former. Similarly, in industry, some industrial engineers are expected to be advisers to line managers at the same time they monitor production performance and set standards and budgets. But advising and monitoring are tough to combine because people are unlikely to discuss their inadequacies with anyone who evaluates them. The managers may not necessarily lie, but they sometimes hide the truth (just as teen-agers do not always confide in their parents, seeking instead the counsel of friends or even friends' parents because they don't want to destroy the ideal image they want their own parents to hold of them).
Conflicting Demands from Different People
All members of your role set (especially your boss) depend in some way on your performance; perhaps they require it in order to perform their own tasks. Because they have a stake in your effectiveness, they make demands. Unfortunately, these several demands often are conflicting so you are compelled to contradictory behavior. For example, university professors are expected to teach (and pressure is increasing from students and administrators to do a better job of it). They are also expected to perform research and publish articles in prestigious journals; their colleagues expect them to be good citizens in serving on the endless committees that characterize academia (not to mention community expectations and family needs for additional income).
Managers occupying boundary-spanning positions, such as sales managers who have extensive contacts with outsiders, work under role conflict. Their customers' expectations on delivery time, product quality, and credit terms may be inconsistent with company policies to stretch out delivery, reduce product cost, and minimize accounts payable. Nonetheless, corporate executives still expect the manager to compete.
Division general managers in large corporations occupy rewarding but stressful positions. They must maintain three-way relationships: upward to corporate staff, lateral to other divisions, and downward to subordinates. Responding to one of these can undermine another. A middle manager who obediently follows orders from headquarters may thereby weaken his or her authority over subordinates who perceive the manager as a flunky for top management. Pushing the subordinates' interests too strongly, however, may lead superiors to conclude that the manager has no overall perspective, or even worse, is disloyal to the chain of command. Adding to the stress is the reality that responsibility frequently exceeds authority. The middle manager is responsible for division performance, but sometimes corporate staff sets policies that hinder achievement of objectives.
Conflicting Roles and Demands from Multiple People
In the complex theater of modern life, most of us play not to one audience but to several, and we play multiple roles almost at the same time. Unfortunately, one role's expectations can conflict with those of another. Married men and women often suffer from competing demands about their several roles: their spouse's expectations of devotion to family and employer's demands for job commitment. The working parent may want to be both an attentive father or mother and an ambitious, mobile employee, but there is neither time nor energy fully to live up to both competing desires. Career women with high self-esteem and sense of competence especially are prone to role overload. As one researcher on working parents put it: "It was an extraordinary experience for me, going to those homes and talking to those women who had great circles under their eyes. These were women who talked about sleep the way a starving person would talk about food."
After doing interviews with exhausted working mothers, she would worry about the "naive" young women in the classes she teaches at the University of California at Berkeley: "These kids have no idea what is coming. They all expect to have careers and to have children. I really wonder if these kids are going to walk off a cliff in a short five or six years later without knowing what they are "getting into."
American managers may also experience conflict between competing ideologies of success and equality. Success is often associated with attainment of higher status. But equality is also a strong American value, so managers strive to differentiate themselves from peers and subordinates while still considering them as equals. One result is the strange (to most foreigners) custom of American superiors and subordinates calling each other by their first names. Another is a disappearance of executive perquisites such as reserved parking spaces and special catering and food services, in the name of equality and setting an example for lower employees.
Learning the subtle expectations of various demanders can be particularly wearing on managers who climb upward from modest socioeconomic backgrounds. Moving up the ladder usually means moving physically and psychologically away from old neighborhoods and companions into a more affluent social set that expects different behavior (for example, no white socks, less public swearing, perhaps less smoking and drinking, more emotional control, and so on). To a remarkable degree in post-World War II America, white males from modest backgrounds have made this climb, but the stress of letting go of the old and learning the new demands appears to weigh heavier on those from working class families than on those reared in a professional or managerial, upper-middle-class home. It can be particularly tough on upwardly striving females and African-Americans.
Response to Role Stress
Paradoxically, the most debilitating response to role stress is to be passive-and in this regard, no difference exists between men and women. We could respond by simply sleeping and playing less while working harder to meet everyone's expectations. We may even welcome the demands in order to justify being a workaholic. Working mothers especially are pressed to meet traditional homemaking expectations while working outside the home full time. In general, such women do twice as much around the house as men-ten hours more a week (al-though it drops to only a difference of five hours when both are college-educated professionals). One loss from this extra duty is sleep: working mothers average almost one hour per night less sleep than their husbands. Unfair, but put in historical context, twenty years ago women did six times as much at home as their husbands.
Some of us succeed with this doing-everything approach for a long time. Many medical school students, for example, have been so ambitious, so conscientious, and so bright that up until age twenty-three or so they have literally met all multiple role demands-been the A student, the model citizen, and the good son or daughter. But suddenly in medical school for the first time they confront overload where they simply can't meet all demands. This can be particularly trying if one has never experienced failure before (see how lucky you've been to have been spared a record of unbroken success up until this point in your life).
Burnout
A few great men and women may be all things to all people, but most of us cannot. Trying to meet all demands can simply make us sick, particularly when you have few friends or relatives to lend support. Descriptions of the so-called "Type E" woman, for example, highlight the socialization that some girls receive to sacrifice self in service to assorted others without concern for one's own ambitions. However attractive such a saintly image may be (especially to those benefitting from the saint's sacrifice), it is not a viable tactic for most of us. In extreme cases, responding to all demands can lead to a burnout in which life turns dull and all activity seems meaningless. Becoming inert becomes protection from others' demands for people who in response to others' requests just don't know how to say "no."
Medical experts don't know exactly what constitutes burnout, but warning signs include:
- periods of sustained lethargy or lack of consistent productivity
- preoccupation with non-work-related issues
- feeling that changing one's job and living arrangement may improve one's happiness on the job
- changing jobs frequently without evidence of increased responsibility or upward mobility
- indication that the person is a loner but that isolation causes acute discomfort
- failure to analyze future directions by claiming that no direction is the best direction
- a deep, if superficially considered, concern about the meaning of one's life
Flight
Running away from life, abandoning your family, or quitting your job and becoming a ski bum in Colorado all reflect flight as a way of alleviating stress. It can be tempting because it appears so easy to drop out of school, divorce your spouse, or tell your boss to go to hell. And of course some or all of these dramatic actions may be justified in certain circumstances, especially when you feel burned out. Nonetheless, their simplicity is misleading because short of suicide or total insanity, no one can flee entirely; you cannot live in a vacuum. And living with too narrow a set of roles can actually hurt you. People involved in many different groups and activities appear to live longer than more narrowly focused people.
Besides, people who habitually run from stress have a way of repeatedly finding themselves in similar stressful situations because they cut themselves off from the real world, retreating to illusions. So people who divorce once are more likely to experience a second divorce than those who have not. And men who desert their families when under emotional or economic pressure seldom later make lasting commitments (one of the sad aspects of increased career opportunities for women has been an increase in the rate of their family desertion, although it is still much less common than among men). Married working women under extreme pressure are simply more likely to quit their jobs and focus on family. The rate of turnover in management positions is two and a half times higher among top-performing women than it is among men.
Partial flight into alcohol or drugs unhappily is a path that some stressed-out people pursue. Too often such a "partial" flight has a way of turning into total as the habit overwhelms the addict. A survey of personnel administrators indicates that drugs and alcohol are the leading causes of career derailment. Another unfortunate byproduct of the fortunate expansion of women's career opportunities has been the increase in drinking by career women. Whether as an escape from job stress or merely trying to keep up with one's male colleagues at the bar after work, drinking an equal amount of alcohol tends to have more serious physical impact on women simply because of their lighter average weight.
Certainly, resignation from a job is sometimes a valid step for courageous people, but generally only when other stress-handling tactics will not work.
Partial Withdrawal
Rather than fleeing from everything, you could selectively ignore certain demands, in effect withdrawing from (or postponing) certain life dimensions. For example, ambitious young graduates frequently postpone marriage and family in order to simplify their lives while they focus on building a career. The age of first marriage and first parenthood is the oldest in United States history. Senior female executives have particularly difficult ladders to climb and they are much less likely to marry and have children than their male colleagues (44 percent of women vice presidents at Fortune 1000 companies are unmarried compared with but 7.5 percent of men at similar levels).
Ambitious family men, however, often ignore all requests from their communities to become involved in volunteer activities like coaching Little League baseball, serving as a Boy Scout leader, or running for the school board. In older traditional families, they would simply abdicate all community relations to their homemaker spouse. Mow with over 50 percent of married women working outside the home, meeting community expectations and needs has declined even further. Bedroom suburban volunteer rescue squads and fire departments are facing this crisis all over America because people don't feel they have the time or energy to respond to these demands.
When faced with dangerous role overload, of course, it is certainly legitimate to examine what demanders can be ignored. One needs to be aware, however, that there are consequences.
Selective Ignorance
Rather than ignoring a whole set of demanders like one's neighbors, you could instead accept some of their demands and reject others.35 Most students quickly size up a teacher to determine whether he or she really expects them to do all the reading as well as keep good class notes. Prior tests may suggest whether class or reading might be ignored. The dormitory adviser mentioned earlier might minimize communications with school administrators and quietly not enforce anti-drinking regulations while trying to remain an older sister and social leader with her residents. The university professor might simplify his situation by teaching as little as possible and hiding from students while focusing on his research and writing.
Like partial withdrawal, the aim of selective ignorance is to reduce and simplify role demands, perhaps by responding only to exceptionally important demands. The dormitory adviser might take action only against major rule violations and ignore the more numerous minor ones (for example, ignoring underage drinking, but reporting illegal drugs). A newly promoted business supervisor might apply pressure on his former working buddies only when a crisis arises or when senior management is present. Otherwise, the supervisor adheres to the group's informal code.
Key in selective ignorance is accurate assessment of the political environment: just whose demands are more important or what expectations are less valid. Analyzing power and authority may be useful.
Respond to Power
The most pragmatic response to conflicting demands from various people is to minimize potential pain by giving priority to the person who can punish (or reward) you. Working parents, for example, tend to give priority to job demands at the expense of children and spouse. Only 6 percent of women and 7 percent of men say they slight their job to satisfy family demands, but 30 percent of women and 33 percent of men feel that children's demands are given lower priority when there is a conflict between a working parent's job and home. Children simply are deemed to have less power than employers.
But ignored children often get an unintended revenge. The number one cause of guilt feelings among executives is not making a bad decision on the job; it is guilt about not paying enough attention to their children. And they are right to feel guilty and afraid because unhappy adolescent children can impose an enormous burden on executives precisely at the time that their job responsibilities are expanding most rapidly. As one stress counselor put it:
Just about everyone dealing with (executives who crack up) comments on the ubiquity of problems with adolescent children. Don't underestimate the damage that parental heartache can do; the president of one FORTUNE 500 company, distracted by the emotional problems of his daughter, ended up acting so strangely that he was forced to forfeit both his job and his status as heir apparent to the chairman.
At work, the political question is who has the most power to satisfy or frustrate your needs. This is likely to be a hierarchical superior. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to determine who has the most power. And even if you know this, responding only to that person can still hurt you because ignored others may possess sufficient power to retaliate-and your preferred one may not want to expend political capital to defend you.
Even your boss may not be happy if giving him or her priority means your role is not performed well. Lower-rated managers seem to conform the most to direct superiors, while higher-rated managers ignore demands that interfere with performance. They get the job done and most superiors value results over blind obedience.
Respond to Legitimacy
Rather than raw power, you could give priority to the demands judged most legitimate. The questions are: "Who has the most right to the results of my performance?" Or, "What behavior on my part will contribute most to the organization's mission?" Power and legitimacy may reside in the same superior, but not always. A powerful vice president might bypass your department head to direct you to concentrate on "Project Baker," while your direct superior wants "Project Able" completed first. The most legitimate demand is probably the department head's, but the vice president has more power.
Conflict between power and legitimacy can be particularly acute where powerful figures want you to exploit others or to violate the law. The most influential pressure for unethical behavior is the example of senior executives. Some unfortunate managers see their careers blocked unless an undeserving subordinate is wrongfully dismissed, a competitor illegally spied upon, or an antipollution statute broken. You as an ethically sensitive person may know what is right in such (I hope) rare circumstances, but the choice will be unpleasant either way.
Compartmentalize Demands
Cinder stress you can define arbitrary personal rules that separate demand responses. Usually this means changing priorities depending on where in the daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly calendar the demand occurs. For example, a professor might sequence demand response by devoting Tuesdays and Thursdays wholly to classes and students; Mondays to paperwork, committees, and administrative chores; Wednesdays to earning extra income through consulting; and Fridays and weekends to research and writing. Note that the intent of such arbitrary rules is to simplify the professor's life. She does not have to decide what to do with each demand; she just fits it into a category (so if a student knocks at her office door on a Friday when she is writing, the knock is ignored-not "fair" and not pretty, but effective).
Although business managers seldom enjoy the discretionary control over their time that professors do, an executive might allot three nights a week to his family regardless of job demands, but on other nights unexpected job demands have priority regardless of his daughter's field hockey game or his wife's need for assistance with the laundry. The advantage of such impersonal rules is that you don't have to analyze the specific situation before applying the prescription. You don't have to reinvent the wheel repeatedly.
Increasingly this approach is being applied to one's life and career. Many young people are simply postponing family demands early in their careers in order to give priority to job demands. They hope that early success will give them political strength and financial resources later to withdraw partially from the job and then better balance work and personal demands. For some women, this takes the form of temporary partial withdrawal after an early fast start in order to give more time to family for a while before reassuming a larger commitment to career. Such approaches can be wise, but they are not guaranteed to be successful given the vagaries of humankind's biological clocks, the work and fun of being a full-time parent, and a firm's uncertainty about the true commitment of someone who partially withdraws for a time.
Calls for dual-career tracks for women, the so-called "career" versus "mommy" tracks, flexi-time (allowing employees flexibility on when they put in their weekly forty hours), four-day work weeks, parental leaves of absence, and longer vacations all reflect employee desire to have more control over how they compartmentalize the various demands in their lives.
Even elimination of compulsory retirement reflects older workers' desire to determine when they change their role behavior. The reality is that actual retirement age has been decreasing, presently at approximately sixty-two (the age at which partial social security payments can begin). Some unhappy executives are able to hang on in stressful work situations because of their dream of retiring at fifty-nine-and-a-half when they can begin drawing on their individual retirement accounts without a tax penalty. A short-timer's attitude can be helpful in handling stress because it becomes a psychological withdrawal-you perform the tasks but don't worry about the results. Too many such people, of course, can hurt the organization.
Modify Demands
The healthiest and most courageous response to role stress is to modify the demands on you by confronting your role set. The misassigned individual could apply for a transfer; the under challenged could request more interesting work (or just find it and do it); the overwhelmed could demand less pressure; one under role conflict could inform his or her superiors that they should coordinate their demands. The college dormitory adviser could ask to be relieved of her police duties; the professor could request evaluation as a teacher or researcher, but not both; the supervisor could ask for a transfer to a department where he is not supervising old friends; the division general manager could ask central corporate staff to rescind undesired policies; and spouses could agree to change their mutual expectations.
All of these initiatives involve small acts of courage because the people imposing demands may be unwilling to modify them. Whether their reasons for refusal are valid or not is quite irrelevant if they believe in their legitimacy. A wife who talks with her spouse about changing the ground rules over respective duties can deeply offend the other party. A boss might become angry with a star-performing woman who requests a reduction in her responsibilities for a period of time so she can care for her young children. And if the subordinate becomes too insistent, the boss may threaten retaliation.
A sense of proportion is critical. An astute manager will fight to change role demands, but not always. A division general manager, for example, should oppose the most crippling central policies, but continual fighting can exhaust his or her upward influence and destroy credibility. Like an army general, battle only on the most favorable grounds.
Change Desires
Role stress invariably forces you to reexamine what you really want. You may desire security, but also want love. The latter, however, means exposing yourself to another who then can hurt you. Or you desire social prestige and self-esteem, but in some situations the former may require sacrifice of the latter. Well known is the dissonance of the ambitious person who seeks fame, finds it, and then bemoans the lack of privacy.
Most of us desire fulfillment and consistency. We want to satisfy multiple needs simultaneously while maintaining consistency in our behavior. Critical of hypocrites who say one thing and do another, we want other's perceptions and judgments about ourselves to be consistent with our own. If a professor who believes he is a good teacher hears that his students consider him a bore, to restore equilibrium he will either: (1) reorganize and upgrade his notes and seek guidance to improve his teaching; or (2) reject the validity of the students' assessment by pointing out their immaturity and lack of knowledge. Either approach might succeed in eliminating his dissonance and restoring his sense of well-being.
When caught in incompatible desires and demands, you might respond by changing your desires. You might conclude that autonomy is not that important to you, or that you really didn't want a promotion anyway. For example, "I wouldn't want that guy's job for all the money in the world. How does he stand it?" Or, "I'm glad I didn't get the promotion I requested; I sure would've missed all my pals in this department."
Such redefinition of desires may be either a mature decision that clarifies one's personal identity or a game to fool oneself out of frustration. An ambitious manager whose route upward is blocked may tell himself that, after all, leisure and family are more important. Whether he really means it will depend on later actual satisfaction. If the ambition still drives him, he may even resent his family because they symbolize his lost opportunity.
Mature reexamination of one's desires can be particularly difficult for ambitious managerial types who have prided themselves on their fortitude, self-discipline, and rationality. Expressing emotion, particularly discouragement and anxiety (or worse, panic), is deemed unacceptable by many executives and corporations. Consequently, the stress is bottled up, thus cutting off sensitivity to their real desires. Consider the words of one very successful thirty-four-year-old woman:
I've been married for ten years and this looks as if it will be the last year. I've put everything I had into my career-and I've done very well. My friends ask, "How could you have problems?" If they only knew.
I have two problems really. One is that I've concluded that the climb toward the top in business isn't worth the effort. You get high enough up to look out and see the scenery, and you realize how much you've missed by keeping the nose to the grindstone. .. . Life has passed me by. I don't know how to do anything but work and make money and get promotions.
The other problem, of course, is with the marriage. My husband has done well, too, but we've gone off in opposite directions. He's as unhappy with himself as I am with me and as a result, we're un-happy-and often uncivilized-with each other.... We've started therapy, but I'm afraid it's too late ... I wish I had a soapbox to stand on and an audience to preach to. I'd talk about priorities.
Now, let's return to our two increasingly unhappy career couples.
Love on the Ground
Robert Goldman, Sylvia Garfein, Louise O'Brien, and Mark Grazia unfortunately are facing many of the role conflict situations described. In her consulting work, Louise suffers particularly from the ambiguity of the partnership's management hierarchy, so she receives uncoordinated simultaneous demands from partners whose power to help or hurt her is uncertain. She tries to satisfy all job demands while trying to balance being a wife and mother. Her husband Mark has been generally helpful and sharing, but he now wants Louise to give priority to his and their son's needs because he believes they are the most legitimate. Louise is considering flight from the job, at least for some time, but she worries that she would never be able to get back on the track that leads to partnership-and that this would remain an unfulfilled dream for which she would blame her family.
Sylvia's work situation seems happier, but she did comment on her task ambiguity when she first started in full-time research. In medical school, and even during internship and residency, tasks were rather clearly defined by a professor or the patient's illness. Research, however, was so much more ambiguous. Her mentor wouldn't tell her what to do; those kinds of clearly defined tasks are handled by laboratory assistants. Sylvia's challenge was much less structured and this created anxiety until she gained a fuller understanding of what the role demanded.
Sylvia appears to expect her husband Robert to change his desires and move to Boston to accommodate her ambitions. She probably feels that Robert's sacrifice would be less than her own if she acquiesced to his wish for her to come home to New York and practice medicine on a part-time basis. In this respect, Sylvia and Mark Grazia are similar. He seems to feel that his career desires are more legitimate than his wife Louise's so that she should reduce her career aspirations and get a "local" non-traveling job that would facilitate better balance and compartmentalization of her life.
At stake in these two situations is more than work, of course. The stability of their marriages will be affected by the tactics exercised. In surveying how married couples handle these problems, four observed strategies can be arrayed along a stability continuum.
Mutual Partial Withdrawal from Career: Among dual-career families, the most stable marriage relationship seems to exist when both parties lower their career aspirations and give central priority to their family relationships. One marriage therapist argues:
What I see with two careers is more planning of leisure time together and a heightened concern about what can happen to the marriage if there's too much work and not enough play. In a single-career marriage, there seems to be a greater tendency for the husband to get all wrapped up in his career and to deny family responsibilities. This can lead to all kinds of trouble.
This tactic seems most relevant in dual-professional couples (some-times even in the same field) who work quite independently of organizational hierarchy-for example, two professors or two physicians. They both try to limit their work to a "normal" 40 hours, reject overtime or travel demands, and define their career success by the quality and enjoyment of their work rather than by promotions or income increases. A study of married psychologists indicated virtually identical work weeks for husbands and wives-41.5 hours per week for the men versus 41.3 for the women (although in addition, the wives put in 23 hours per week on household work versus only 18 hours for their husbands).
Compare these working hours with the 60 hours per week reported in a Fortune survey of fast-track corporate executives (most of the men having non-career wives and many of the women being unmarried).
Even this mutually balanced strategy involves some risk, however. We may underestimate the effort needed to maintain job competence, or in time become bored because we didn't take enough risks in accepting moves and promotions. Or the husband and wife may not be entirely honest with themselves. As the years pass and they see more career-committed colleagues surpassing them in renown or income, one or the other of the married couple (more likely the male) may come to blame the other for not being "supportive" enough, thus blocking the success they might have had.
Relative Stability: The Wife Changes Desires and Withdraws from Career. Even the most modern of couples tend to feel that if someone should sacrifice career aspirations, temporarily or permanently, it should be the wife. In the 1980s, employment in part-time jobs rose almost twice as fast as full-time employment. And the vast majority (73 percent) of those working part time are women who claim to prefer the arrangement. Hence, Mark Grazia's belief that his wife should come home, take care of their son for a couple of years, and then if she desires get a "job" that is more easily controllable than a high-powered career. And because the pressures on a working wife/mother are in fact higher than on most husbands (a recent survey indicated that 77 percent of working mothers still handle cooking and 64 percent dishwashing without assistance!),she is likely to be under greater stress, which makes this option more attractive to her than to her husband.
Her sense of loss, however, may well be tempered, if not nullified, by an often unexpected enjoyment of maintaining a home and being full-time parent-joys that many highly educated women have been surprised to discover.
Like the first strategy of mutual withdrawal, focusing aspiration change and career withdrawal on the wife carries a danger of subsequent resentment when she finds it impossible to pick up the threads of her career if she desires later to reenter the fast lane. Even worse, by in effect becoming a "corporate wife," the woman may lose a sense of personal identity as her role becomes an adjunct of her husband's (which is what Robert Goldman fears).
This tradeoff of husband focusing on career and wife on family is of course the modern version of the "traditional family." Although much is said about it being a dying model, a Fortune survey of the most successful of the baby boomers in their late thirties revealed that only 25 percent of the males had wives who were pursuing careers. Most of the others in these over $100,000 a year households didn't work at all outside the home. Apparently, high income makes the traditional pattern possible or attractive-or reduces the incentive for the wife to work because of the additional taxes that would be paid.
Relative Instability:
Husband Changes Desires and Partially Withdraws from Career. Given the persistence of the traditional image of the husband as breadwinner (and the reality of higher salaries for males), having the man lower his career sights to accommodate his wife's ambitions is rarer than the opposite. Most couples, but especially the husband, would be more uncomfortable with this approach-particularly if the man became known as "Mr. Garfein" or a "househusband" like Robert Goldman fears. Nonetheless, this accommodation is not unknown, particularly on a limited time basis as when a wife is finishing school or starting a new career. One of my closest professional colleagues was an incredibly talented woman who moved up a ladder of increasingly prestigious academic and government administrative positions including being a member of the governor's cabinet and senior vice president of a major university. She even had five sons along the way. But she had a husband who accommodated (and limited) his entrepreneurial activity to her achievements apparently without resentment or loss of self-esteem. The test of this strategy's rarity and difficulty, however, is measured by the general perception that he was indeed a "saint." My guess is that Sylvia Garfein would admire my colleague's husband more than Bob Goldman would.
Most Unstable: Both Put Career First. Putting one's career first and sacrificing family activities is a time-honored strategy among men, of course, but rarer among married couples. And except among exceptional independent people, this approach appears to contain the seeds of its own dissolution. If careers are so central to both parties, it is just not likely that their relationship would be so unique as to survive its peripheralness. One review of a book on working parents observed:
In general, the upper-income professionals in Ms. Hochschild's sample tend to be the worst hypocrites. (They) seemed to capitulate to a workaholism a deux, each spouse equitably granting the other the right to work long hours, and reconciling themselves to a drastically reduced conception of the emotional needs of a family. Such couples almost totally parceled out the role of mother into purchased services."
It doesn't appear that either of our traveling loving couples could really make this approach work.
Mo one can predict how our two couples will end up. In terms of family stability, I guess I would put my money on Louise O'Brien and Mark Grazia because they are heading toward a more traditional relationship, but just as there is more to life than a career, there is more to life than a marriage. Therefore, who will maximize life satisfaction is unknown. What is known, however, is that all approaches to handling role stress require trade-offs. In no other area is the old economic proverb "there isn't no free lunch" more valid. The key is making your decisions and staying committed to them without continually looking over your shoulder and wondering "what if?" As the poet put it, "Of all the words of mice and men, the saddest are it might have been."
Your greatest enemy in handling role stress is passivity. Responding to everyone's demands is not a long-term viable strategy. It is a recipe for burnout.
Advice on Handling Role Stress
- Total flight from an unhappy situation can be valid under extreme circumstances, but only as a last resort. Fleeing can become a habit and a strategy for avoiding commitment.
- If you decide to stay, don't keep looking for other opportunities. The strongest defense against stress is commitment to what you are presently doing.
- Experiment with your environment to determine what demands you can ignore at acceptable cost and what aspirations you can compromise with minimal guilt. Self-flexibility, indeed delight in varying your behavior, is key to being effective in complex roles.
- Under short-term pressure, it is acceptable to give practical priority to demands from the most powerful, but it is seldom a satisfying long-term strategy because other people whose demands may be more legitimate may still be able to hurt you.
- Recognize that demands from your immediate superior are usually more legitimate than those from higher-level mentors who cannot be counted on to defend you from your boss's anger if his or her legitimate demands are unmet.
- Most organizations don't expect perfect conformity to all policies and procedures if doing so undermines your performance. Performance is generally valued and rewarded, even if it requires some policy violations (and is not illegal). However, if your results are unsatisfactory, you may well be punished for not following rules.
- Be courageous in confronting people who make demands on you when necessary to negotiate new terms.
- Periodically examine your values and life desires to ensure that your necessary compromises are mature decisions and not rationalizations.
