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Abstract
The article examines the effects of social stress on work performance in a laboratory study using a battery of performance tests. Social stress was induced by a combination of negative feedback and ostracism. Participants received negative performance feedback and were ostracised by two confederates of the experimenter. Using a one-way experimental design with three levels (machine-induced stress, human-induced stress, and no stress), 102 participants performed the following tasks: attention, divergent and convergent creativity. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring positive and negative affect, and state self-esteem. The manipulation check confirmed that social stress was successfully implemented. The results showed that social stress increased negative affect and reduced self-esteem. However, performance remained unaffected by social stress on any of the cognitive tasks, with no difference emerging between human-induced and machine-induced stress. The findings provide support for the ‘blank-out’-mechanism, which assumes that humans can maintain performance levels even under difficult working conditions.
Practitioner summary: Social stress in the form of negative performance feedback and social exclusion has a negative impact on the affect and self-esteem of humans. However, performance on subsequent tasks was not impaired.
Abbreviations: TSST: trier social stress test; SSES: state self-esteem scale; PANAS: positive and negative affect schedule; ANOVA: analysis of variance
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Margot Bernet and Cyrille Fragnière for their help in completing this piece of research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).