Operating Under Stress: An Experiential Exercise to Illustrate the Sources and Consequences of Work Stress

Abstract

This experiential exercise is crafted around the classic board game Operation® (Hasbro 2008). Students are instructed that they are members of an emergency room team responsible for curing their patient of their ailments. However, unlike the board game, students in roles of doctors, nurses, and chief of surgery grapple with numerous sources of work-related challenge and hindrance stressors while trying to complete their job duties. In addition, participants are intermittently exposed to various types of work and non–work-related stressors throughout the exercise that cause interruptions to job fulfillment. These various conditions serve to illuminate the sources of job stress as well as the implications of both challenge and hindrance stressors on critical workplace outcomes, such as motivation, satisfaction, and workplace performance. This experiential exercise can be expanded to incorporate several organizational behavior topics, such as justice/fairness, leadership, teamwork, and work redesign.