12 Terms to Remember
Burnout: A state of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion caused by prolonged or excessive stress, often exacerbated by dysfunctional team dynamics.
Cohesion: Strength of group members’ attraction to maintaining membership in the group and the strength of links developed among group members.
Collaborating style: Conflict management approach that seeks win-win solutions where everyone benefits, often ideal but time-consuming and requiring mutual cooperation.
Conservation of Resources (COR) Model: Theory proposing that people work to acquire and maintain resources needed to ward off stress, with resource loss playing a critical role in stress processes.
Coping strategies: Behavioral or cognitive efforts to manage or reduce stress, enhanced by team support and shared resources.
Descriptive norms: Group expectations that define what most people actually do in particular situations, such as working long hours or checking email after hours.
Fight-or-flight response: Physiological stress response that increases heart rate, breathing, and energy availability while suppressing non-essential functions like digestion.
General Adaptation Syndrome: Three-stage model of stress response including alarm stage, adaptation/resistance stage, and exhaustion stage.
Groupthink: Mode of thinking that occurs when the desire to agree becomes so dominant in a cohesive group that it overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives.
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis: Body system that plays a central role in stress response through hormone release, activated by both physical and psychological stressors.
Interpersonal conflict: Tension and friction in workplace relationships that can significantly impact individual stress and well-being.
Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model: Theory suggesting that stress occurs when job demands exceed available resources, with team factors serving as either demands or resources.
Learned helplessness: Generalized feelings of powerlessness that can develop from repeated experiences where individual actions have no effect on team or organizational outcomes.
Life-Change Model: Theory proposing that all life changes, positive or negative, contribute to stress load through required adaptation and adjustment.
Prescriptive norms: Group expectations that suggest what people should do, feel, or think in particular situations, such as maintaining work-life boundaries.
Role ambiguity: Lack of clarity about job duties, responsibilities, or expectations within teams, creating uncertainty and stress.
Role conflict: Incompatible demands or expectations placed on an individual in their work role, often arising from unclear team structures or competing priorities.
Role overload: Feeling that one lacks necessary skills, resources, or time to complete required tasks effectively.
Social facilitation: Improved performance on tasks in the presence of others, particularly for simple or well-learned tasks, but impaired performance for difficult or new tasks.
Social loafing: Reduction in individual effort when people work in groups compared to working alone, often due to diffusion of responsibility or feeling less accountable.
Social support: The perceived availability of help and emotional resources from supervisors, coworkers, family, and friends.
Spillover Model: Theory proposing that attitudes and behaviors carry over from work to family domains or vice versa, creating either positive or negative effects.
Stress: A psychological and physiological reaction to environmental demands that tax or exceed adaptive capacities, significantly influenced by team context and social factors.
Stress-performance curve: The relationship between stress levels and performance that follows an inverted U-shape, with optimal performance at moderate stress levels.
Stressor: Any demand that requires coping, including both individual and team-level demands that challenge adaptive capacity.
Team effectiveness: A multidimensional concept encompassing team performance, member attitudes, and withdrawal behaviors that reflects overall team functioning.
Transaction Model: Theory recognizing stress as residing in the interaction between person and environment, emphasizing cognitive appraisal processes and subjective interpretation.
Underemployment: Working fewer hours than desired or in positions below one’s skill level, which creates psychological distress levels between those of adequately employed and unemployed workers.
Work-family balance: The degree to which individuals can simultaneously satisfy work and family demands, significantly influenced by team norms and organizational support.
Workplace bullying: Harassing, offending, socially excluding, or assigning humiliating tasks to persons in subordinate positions repeatedly over extended periods of time.