Organisational Membership as a Source of Stress: Its Effects on the Middle Manager and the Middle-aged

Abstract

Chapter 3 emphasised the individual specific nature of stress definition and focused on the manager as the performer of a particular job function. Several of its themes however had little to do with the type of work he does and were more relevant to the manager in his general role as an organisational member. It is these wider aspects of the manager’s work life, his relationships with the organisation and its other members which we would now like to consider in more depth. Organisational membership appears as a pressure in two closely related ways — in the restrictions it places on the individual’s day-to-day activities and the control it exercises over his future development. These will be discussed in turn; in the first section a further distinction between pressures which have long been acknowledged and those which are the result of more recent trends in society can also be made.