Posted By Kieran J Duignan
As long ago as 1955, a leading American clinical psychologist, George Kelly, published 'The Psychology of Personal Constructs', specifically about creative ways of helping people to understand stress and manage it more effectlvely.
A Welsh occupational psychologist, Ken Powell, used this method to investigate occupational stress, iniitially within IBM (for his M Sc thesis); he published an explanation in 'Stress in Your Life', Thorsons, 1988 which was translated into several languages. He continued his line of work and wrote 'Burnout' published by Thorsons in 1993. Sadly, he died a month after this was published.
Ken's books are a modern introduction to using repertory grids as a method of enquiring about occupational stress. They have the great advantage that they carry out the exploration in the language of clients, rather than that 'imported' by a researcher or a computer.
Ken was my counselling supervisor from 1984 to 1993; besides one-to-one supervision, he helped me with a fruitful use of repertory grids to explore stress in a large UK sales office of an international electronics company under strain in 1992, where problems of change could otherwise have become expensive for the company to handle.
Unavoidably, investigating stress reflects the culture of the organisation where the investigation is conducted. Sometimes, managers spoil the enquiry by not-so-subtle manipulations; when they don't, the outcomes can resolve problems that have been seen as a swamp.
Enquiring about stress also tends to release stressors. Sometimes, it can be well worth letting the flak just pass you by, and smile.
If you want to test a useful computer program for using repertory grids, you can do so at
www.gridsuite.de (a bilingual site in the University of Stuttgart) free for up to 45 days.