Ready to unwind from a stressful week at work? Placing the blame on your work environment for that stress is not always the case, according to a recent study.
Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business concluded that genetics, not the work environment, is a larger contributor to stress. Judge studied 600 identical and fraternal twins and found that shared genes are four times as important as shared environment.
"Assume James and Sandy both work in the same organization," said Judge. "James reports more stress than Sandy. Does it mean that James' job is objectively more stressful than Sandy's?" Not necessarily. Our study suggests strong heritabilities to work stress and the outcomes of stress. This means that stress may have less to do with the objective features of the environment than to the genetic 'code' of the individual."
Judge says that people "shouldn't assume that we're a 'blank slate' and therefore be overly optimistic about what the work environment can and can't do as far as stress is concerned. More of it has to do with what's inside of us than what we encounter outside in the work environment."
In other words, that urge to tell off your boss is natural, but that doesn't mean you should storm into his office on Monday.
