Lixin Jiang: how leaders can help reduce workplace stress

Dr Lixin Jiang’s fascination with work-related stress in general and job insecurity, in particular, was born out of her own experiences in mainland China of study-related anxiety and burnout.

“I was thinking, if I am this stressed-out as a student, where life is simple, an employee is even more likely to be stressed out.”

Her openness about her struggles makes the senior lecturer in Occupational Health Psychology relatable, despite her singular focus on study and academic achievement throughout her life. Plus, Lixin genuinely wants to make people happier.

Lixin confesses to having few interests outside of work, thanks to an upbringing in which she studied day and night with little time to relax. If she does take time off, she enjoys reading about entrepreneurs or, pre-Covid-19, travelling with her husband.

Lixin’s parents lived through the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961 and hadn’t had the opportunity to get higher degrees themselves. They wanted their sole child, under China’s one-child policy, to go to university and escape the poverty and factory work they’d had to endure.

“Your parents tell you, if you want to have a good life, you have to push your education. So basically, you have to do nothing but study, study, study,” Lixin says.

But in October, China introduced legislation to address that kind of pressure. It passed an education law to ease the ‘twin pressures’ of homework and out-of-school tutoring, seeking to ban the latter. The law says parents need to adjust children’s time to account for rest and exercise, so reducing pressure on them.

For Lixin, the constant focus on schoolwork meant she was burnt out by the time it came to sit the tough exams required to enter university. She was disappointed with her results and couldn’t get into her first choice of university. Nonetheless, she moved to her province Anhui’s capital to study social work at Anhui University. She had never previously heard of social work, but it sparked her interest in psychology.

This time, hard work paid off and she passed the exams and entered a masters programme in social psychology at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. From there, she moved to the US and completed a doctorate at Washington State University.

The combination of her own experience of study stress and her supervisor’s expertise took her into the field of organisational psychology with a focus on job insecurity. Plus, it was 2010 and in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, many companies were laying off staff.

Lixin worked as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh from 2013 to 2017, but a heavy teaching load meant little time for research. In 2017, a global job hunt led her to a role in the University of Auckland’s School of Psychology, Faculty of Science, where she has taught Occupational Health Psychology and continues her research.

She is conducting a literature review on effective interventions to offset workplace stressors and improve employee well-being, which she hopes will have a tangible impact on local workplaces.

“The biggest impact of job insecurity is on well-being. You are not sure what’s going to happen. This increases people’s anxiety and, if it lasts for a long time, people may develop chronic anxiety or chronic depression. If you’re not healthy, you’re not going to perform well.

“On the surface, they might have to work harder, but the quality of work tends to decrease. And they might work faster but they don’t maintain safety. Creativity suffers because they are preoccupied with the possibility of job loss.”

She says organisations should be upfront and transparent, and keep employees in the loop.

“If you’re thinking about job insecurity, you don’t know what’s going on and you’re worried. Even if the information from the employer is ‘we don’t know what we’re going to do, we’re thinking about it,’ it’s important. Employers also need to offer opportunities for people to ask questions.”

Lixin says leaders play an influential role and employers need to make sure staff’s direct managers have good relationship skills. Mutual trust and respect improve employees’ ability to cope with stress.

Another factor that supports employee well-being is a sense of fairness and justice. For example, if someone applies for an internal job and fails, constructive feedback helps with their continued motivation.

Lixin says at an individual level, positive traits such as optimism, resilience, self-belief and hope can help people cope with the stress created by job insecurity. But she believes more workplace interventions are needed.

Currently, there are unique stressors for those working remotely from home in lockdown.

“It’s a big change having a virtual team and knowing how to maintain work-life balance for all organisations and employees. Leaders need to check people have the equipment they need and a space where they can work quietly. They also need psychological support. People may feel isolated, but you can provide social support with Zoom.

“Even though we’ve all had enough of Zoom, technology can help in lockdown,” Lixin says, as we end our virtual interview. It is almost 5pm, and she has an online class to teach.

Story by Jodi Yeats