The push to return to the office has sparked backlash — employees felt trusted to work remotely, so why take that control away? But what role does control play in mitigating or causing stress? And when is autonomy a bad thing? Professor Jia Lin Xie joined the Executive Summary to unpack how job demands, individual traits and culture shape our experience at work, and how to determine if complete control will be empowering or stress-inducing.
The push to return to the office has sparked backlash — employees felt trusted to work remotely, so why take that control away? But what role does control play in mitigating or causing stress? And when is autonomy a bad thing? Professor Jia Lin Xie joined the Executive Summary to unpack how job demands, individual traits and culture shape our experience at work, and how to determine if complete control will be empowering or stress-inducing.
Show notes
[0:00] Meet professor Jia Lin Xie, an expert in job design, stress and employee well being. She’s in the middle of research exploring attitudes towards return to office.
[0:25] The pandemic gave employees control and autonomy over their work, and now many employees feel that control is being taken away by the RTO request. It turns out, once given, removing control can be detrimental. But should it always be given?
[1:26] We’re working in a “boundaryless” world, where technology enables us to be always connected.
[1:56] Research shows boundarylessness can boost job satisfaction, but it also contributes to emotional exhaustion and stress.
[3:35] Those who struggle with boundarylessness might blame their person-environment (P-E) fit.
[4:23] What happens when you have a “good” versus “bad” P-E fit? (Hint: it’s burnout!)
[4:48] Job demands — whether physical, cognitive, or emotional — can make or break your workplace experience.
[6:24] How does having control offset the risks of stressful job demands?
[8:35] Jia Lin questioned the widely held theory that control is always a buffer to job demand stress.
[10:08] Control isn’t always a good thing; things that affect your control include your abilities to do a task…
[11:41] …your attribution style…
[11:59] … and even your cultural background can impact its effectiveness at buffering stress. Take the difference between American and Hong Kong bank tellers.
[14:20] So if you’re struggling with control and autonomy, and think it’s causing you stress, you have to reflect on why that is.
[16:11] So, how can you tell if having more control at work will help or hurt you? Jia Lin has some questions you can ask yourself.
[18:26] The takeaway? Control isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s about self-awareness, personal preferences, and the right support system.
Megan Haynes: Professor Jia Lin Xie is in the middle of some really interesting research. She’s studying perceptions of return to office demands, and employees aren’t exactly happy about it. COVID, interview subjects are saying, clearly showed people could work from home — why, should they have to come to the office?
Jia Lin Xie: Then I asked them why they don't want to come to work in the office. There were many different answers. They were given the control by working at home. Now they felt they are losing the control.
MH: The Rotman School of Management professor is still in the early days of this new exploration of work-from-home/return to office research, and her findings are pretty anecdotal at this stage. But she has been studying job design, stress and employee wellbeing for decades, and the idea of control — having autonomy over aspects of your job — is a recurring theme in her research.
So, as workplaces continue to grapple with new ways to work, as well as elevated levels of anxiety, it’s worth looking deeper at the role that autonomy plays in our overall job happiness, and whether control is all it’s cracked up to be for everyone…
Welcome to the Executive Summary, I’m Megan Haynes, editor of the Rotman Insights Hub.
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MH: Some of Jia Lin’s most recent research is focused on how the blurred lines between home, technology and work are affecting our stress and well-being — which feels particularly relevant in this post-COVID, new world of work.
She calls it boundarylessness. Thanks to technology, we’re always technically available, and can conceivably decide when and where we’re going to do our work. This might sound great — let’s work on a beach somewhere! — but her research has found that there are some trade-offs.
JLX: Boundarylessness is positively related to employee attitudes such as job satisfaction and occupational commitment, but it's negatively related to their well-being, such as emotional exhaustion and the physical health symptoms.
MH: It makes sense. Workers can feel free to answer emails at their convenience. But it also means that you might be getting requests from your boss late into the evenings, or struggle to disconnect with your job when it’s on your phone. Younger and more technologically savvy employees have reported more positive experiences with boundarylessness, while those with less tech savvy sometimes struggle.
JLX: Results are still preliminary in general, my research findings suggest that boundarylessness is associated with increased perception of control over people’s time and location of their work. That said, I feel the issue is a lot more complicated than that. Do they also have a say about their workload? If not, or if they are asked to manage an excessive amount of workload, their overall sense of control could be diminished.
MH: Some of these are obviously larger picture organizational problems — and if you wanted to learn more about helping employees deal with their stress and anxiety, go give our "Beyond Burnout" episode from earlier this season a listen. But if you feel you’re personally struggling with this newfound sense of boundarylessness — if your stress levels spike every time you get a late-night notification from the boss, or you aren’t as productive as you think you’ll be working from your kitchen table, then you might want to blame your P-E fit.
JLX: P-E fit stands for person-environmental fit. This is a concept in the fields of organizational behavior and psychology. It refers to how well a person's characteristics, such as ability, values even personality match with the characteristics of the working environment, such as job demands, organizational cultural or dynamics in a team.
MH: If you have a good person-environment fit, you’re likely to feel more satisfied, engaged and motivated. People with good P-E fit tend to perform better and often feel less stressed in their jobs. In comparison, if you have a poor fit or a misfit, then you tend to experience higher stress and job dissatisfaction, which can lead to burnout. One of the biggest contributors to P-E misfits is your job demands.
JLX: Job demands refer to the physical, psychological, social and organizational aspects of the job that require effort and skills from employee. These demands could lead to physical or mental strain depending on their intensity and duration. For example, if we talk about a physical demand — that could be lifting heavy objects, working long hours. Cognitive demand, [include] examples such as resolving complex problems, processing a large amount of information. Emotional demands could be things like handling difficult customers, managing workplace conflicts
MH: It’s tiring when your personality clashes with the job demands. Say you’re a shy person in a very public facing role — it tends to take more energy to motivate yourself to get out there and put your quote public face on. Or perhaps you’re a short-tempered individual in a customer service job… dealing with difficult or demanding customers might be draining. You can certainly overcome mild misfit, but Jia Lin says the bigger the gap and the longer it goes on, the greater the chance of that burnout.
And, okay, it sounds great in theory: find a job at an organization that perfectly matches your personality, ability and values. But in practice, a job is a job, and many people don’t have the luxury to find the perfect P-E fit. So are some of us destined to be stressed in our jobs? In comes Robert Karasek.
JLX: If I may introduce Karasek’s model that is one of the most influential theories in the field for job stress. It’s call job demand and the decision latitude theory of job stress. Kerasak developed this model in 1979 with three major predictions. Number one: job demands are detrimental for people's well being. Number two: job control is beneficial for people's well being. Number three, which is the most important prediction: it says job control buffers the detrimental effects of job demand on employees.
And it basically says that when employees have high job control, they could better handle demanding jobs, reducing stress and improving their fit with their working environment. Conversely, low job control could make poor P-E fit more pronounced, leading to higher stress and potential burnout.
MH: Karasek’s model was hugely influential in shaping how we think about modern management practices. Give people control over parts of their job, and they’ll be more motivated, more engaged and less stressed. If you let, say a senior accountant decide which tools to use to do their jobs, they’ll pick one that works best for them. If you provide new parents with the opportunity to set their own schedule, they’ll be able to better balance their work and personal lives.
JLX: I think that he sincerely believe that part of the human nature, is wanting more control. It's a part of a human nature. On the surface, control is good. And also, control is nice. It's consistent with some very popular moves in the field of job design, such as job crafting, such as participative leadership.
But we as academic scholars, we would like to say this is not a universal story.
MH: Jia Lin’s own experience as a manager before academia had her questioning how universally applicable this model was.
JLX: For example, during my time as a team leader in an organization, I tried to delegate responsibility to my team and give my team members more autonomy in their job-related activities. Where some of my team members embraced that willingly, others resisted having more control because .They preferred a more structured approach.
MH: As an academic, Jia Lin studied and daringly questioned the efficacy of Karasek’s model. She believed this theory that giving people some measure of control in the workplace would always help reduce stress wasn’t actually universally applicable. And it turns out, she was right.
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MH: Over dozens of studies in multiple regions, Jia Lin looked at the effectiveness of job control across different individual attributes.
She and her research partners looked not only at self-reported levels of stress, but also epidemiological measures — such as looking for stress hormones in blood and saliva samples. It turns out that…
JLX: Individual differences in the aspect of ability, value and personality may determine whether control is effective or ineffective as a buffer,
MH: First, when it comes to being given control, our abilities — i.e. our skill levels at a certain task — can be hugely influential on whether control helps mitigate our stresses.
And Jia Lin’s research found that when we don’t have job-related abilities, control becomes a stressor.
JLX: We tested this relationship again and again over the years using different measures of ability, such as person, job fit, self efficacy, collective efficacy. The results were remarkably consistent.
MH: I mean, think about it how stressed you would be if you were asked to program a new AI software, when you had no formal training in programming? You’re probably going to feel a bit — if not very — anxious.
That’s an extreme example, of course, but the same concept applies even on smaller tasks, programs or projects you’ve never done before. Think about how daunting new software can feel if you don’t feel very tech savvy, or how nervous you felt the first time you were handed a big project to handle on your own. Chances are if you felt properly trained, your anxiety and stress levels were easier to handle.
Next, your attribution style — or how people explain the causes of events in their lives — also has a huge role to play in whether job control is a buffer.
JLX: For individuals who have an internal attribution style, particularly those who tend to blame themselves for negative outcomes, control increases pressure to succeed and the stress of a possible failure.
MH: And then there are unique cultural differences that make the effectiveness of control very individual.
JLX: In one of the comparative studies we conducted between Hong Kong and American bank tellers in one large international bank, we found out something very interesting. Among the American bank tellers, perceived control reduced the effects of job demand on psychological health and turnover intention, but only for those who reported a higher level of job self efficacy.
Among the individuals who had reported lower level of self efficacy, perceived control actually intensified the negative effects of job demand.
MH: In the U.S., people who believed in their own abilities thrived when given aspects of control over their jobs. But in Hong Kong, the deciding factor wasn’t your individual abilities, but rather, trust your team’s abilities.
JLX: Among Hong Kong bank talent, it was a collective efficacy, which is referring to people's confidence towards their team members, that played a similar buffering role as self efficacy data for the Americans.
We found among the American bank tellers, most of them held individualistic value. Perhaps that's why self efficacy became the key for coping. But among the Hong Kong subjects, on average, they were largely collective in values. That is why we believe collective efficacy appeared to be more important than self efficacy in their stress coping.
MH: So, are there ways people can safeguard themselves against the risk of control?
JLX: I don't think that they are universal guardrails, which would work for everyone, mainly because of the individual differences we just discussed. But if you find yourself struggling with having more personal control over job related activities, it's very important to reflect on why that is.
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JLX: During the COVID times, the school was closed. Our faculty was asked to go home to develop online courses and teach them from home. I was almost devastated. I had no experience with online courses, and my IT skills were very limited. But all of a sudden, I was on my own, isolated and facing this entirely new challenge. Interestingly, I was given full control over how to develop and teach my online courses. In theory, this autonomy should have been empowering. But for me, it was just the opposite. Instead of being a buffering, the newfound control became a huge stressor itself. I mostly attributed my stress to my lack of technical skills. I came to realize actually my propensity in self blaming play a very important role, but I did not know at that time. So the first step in managing stress is to cultivate your self awareness, and you should do that intentionally by understanding the reasons behind your reactions to certain challenges,.
The human psychological world is incredibly complicated.
MH: And while — as we just talked about — everyone will have a unique reaction to being given control over aspects of their job, Jia Lin has some questions you can ask yourself to figure out if it’ll be helpful — per Karasek’s model — or harmful.
JLX: I think the first set of questions one should ask themselves is about my personal preference, my values, my beliefs and my personal liking or disliking. For example, do I prefer structured guidance, or do I thrive in autonomy and decision making? And how comfortable am I with making decisions that would impact other people? Do I feel nervous of having control over outcomes where some outcomes cannot be predicted in advance?
MH: Next, she suggests reflecting on your ability and your resources. Do you have the knowledge and the skills, and the support to effectively handle this newfound control? Will it really stress you out to be thrown into the deep end, so to speak, or do you actually enjoy that type of pressure?
JLX: And the next set question would be potential consequences of having more control. For example, will taking more control add to my workload, physically or psychologically. If I'm given more control, would that take away my sleep, and would that have anything to do with my work life balance, and would that affect my other priority in life?
MH: And how does getting more control help improve or shape your relationship to other people at work? Will it cause power dynamic issues, and if so are you ok with that?
JLX: And also, I think another set of very important question is your priority in your life, your long term development objective? Do I need to have more control in order to learn more, to do more and to cultivate my opportunity for the future? So we all have a long term objective. We all want to be someone, to do something, and then you look at that long term objective, and then you would know clearly, more clearly, whether control actually helps or hinders that long term objective?
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MH: This has been Rotman Executive Summary, a podcast bringing you the latest insights and innovative thinking from Canada's leading business school.
Special thanks to Professor Jia Lin Xie.
Join us next month as we chat with assistant professor Nan Li about what employees can tell you about a company’s bottom line. This episode was written and produced by Megan Haynes. It was recorded by Dan Mazzotta, and edited by Avery Moore Kloss.
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