Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and Berkeley Professor Dana Carney have conducted some interesting new research on stress. They examined the impact of thinking about the value of your time. When we think of "time as money," we become significantly more stressed. That's bad for us as individuals and bad for the organizations in which we work. Stanford Insights summarizes the findings:
Pfeffer’s most recent research, coauthored with Dana R. Carney from the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, demonstrates the physiological consequences of the economic evaluation of time. Their study concludes that people who are keenly aware of the economic value of their time — people who think of time as money — generally are more psychologically stressed and exhibit higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol that do people for whom the economic value of time is less salient.
Why do stress levels matter? Clearly, stress is not good for worker's health. In turn, an individual's health condition affects his or her productivity. We don't want employees to experience burnout, both for their sake and for the benefit of the firm as a whole.
