Offering a managerial perspective on stress management in the restaurant industry - How do managers perceive and handle stress in their daily work?

Abstract

Stress management is a significant topic to study within management as employee well-being and stress experienced at work is rising. One industry where work stress is increasingly rising is the restaurant industry. Restaurant workers face many demanding obligations in their daily work such as managing orders, rapid working tempo and complaining customers. Traditional stress management research has studied stress through a psychological lens and focused on developing stress management frameworks, including best practices and step-by-step models, implemented regardless of context. However, these traditional frameworks are too static and standardized to sufficiently accommodate real work life. As this study illustrates, the restaurant industry is characterized by unpredictability and rapid changes. Few studies have studied stress management from a management perspective and to address this research gap, this study uses an organizational lens to add to the existing stress management literature. This is done by using coordination theory to better serve the complexities inherent in restaurants. This qualitative study addresses the following research question: How do managers perceive and handle stress in their daily work? By collecting primary data from interviews we reach four conclusions. First, we conclude that managers have a united perception of stress appearing from a sense of lost control. Second, we conclude that managers mitigate stress by coordinating personnel using preparations and routines to create accountability and predictability. Third, managers also handle stress by fostering a common understanding. We show how restaurant managers adopt organizational bricolage by consciously considering how to organize restaurants efficiently, and mitigating the risks of crowded areas. Lastly, we emphasize that routines play an important role in creating order and control, but perhaps what our findings highlight even more, is the ability to deviate and adjust from the routines, rather than solely relying on them as strict protocols, that may be vital to handle stress in daily work.