In this paper we present an interdisciplinary approach to inquire the effects of stress in job environments, which integrates a cognitive psychology experiment and an ethnographic study, both conducted with the security guards of an International airport.
The studies and reflections presented in this article are part of the work conducted within the project VisCoSo1. It is an interdisciplinary project, involving members with heterogeneous expertise. Its case study is an International airport, with a focus on specific areas where risk and emergency concerns are particularly present: security and surveillance. In this paper we will concentrate on the work carried out, using different disciplinary approaches, with the personnel in charge of security checkpoints, namely private security guards (about 90 in total). Employees of a private security firm, after specific training they serve as “public officers” in the context of airport security, under the supervision of the Police.
From April 2013 to May 2014, an ethnographer has
conducted 380 hours of participant observation (e.g. Agar,
1996), distributed over different seasons, weekdays and time
slots. After that, from July 2014 until March 2015, she has
conducted audio-recorded qualitative interviews (38) with
some of the guards and the policemen. The ethnography has
produced more than 1000 pages of fieldnotes and 700 ca.
pages of interview transcriptions. On the other hand, in
2014, also a cognitive psychology experiment, aimed at
studying the correlation between situated stress and risky
attitude in professionals working in a complex and
safetycritical environment, has been conducted over 36 security
guards. The analytical outcomes resulting from the
application of these two approaches will constitute the basis
upon which an ontological model of the airport and a more
general one of socio-material systems will be built, which is
the final goal of the VisCoSo project
In this paper we will analyse the relationship between 1 Detection of crisis in socio-material systems via VISualCOgnitive-SOcial processes. www.loa.istc.cnr.it/projects/viscoso/
stress and emotions, on one side, and performance, on the other, in a specific professional setting, that of airport security, looking at it from two different perspectives: the one of cognitive psychology and that of ethnographic studies. We will show the primary results of the two approaches, but we will also show how very interesting insights and future directions for research can emerge from the encounter of the two.
In this section we illustrate the experiment. Stress is the
cognitive perception that a situation is uncontrollable and
unpredictable and elicits psychological, physiological and
behavioural reactions
Participants. The experiment has involved 36 participants,
recruited from the International airport that has been chosen
as case study for the project. They are employed with the
role of security guards. They have been randomly assigned
to one of the two experimental conditions: stressful vs.
relaxed situations (exposure to a video). The two groups
were matched (p=N.S. for all the comparisons) for
demographic and personality characteristics (see Table 1 for
details). All participants provided written informed consent.
Personality Assessment. At the beginning of the study
participants have been asked to answer questionnaires
investigating the degree to which people perceive their life
as stressful
Emotional Assessment. Data have been analysed by
independent-samples T-test, where the responses to the
questionnaires were used as dependent variables and the two
groups as the grouping variable. The two groups of
participants did not show significant differences either on
their perceived stress (PSS) [t(39)=.41, p=.68] or on their
impulsivity (BIS11) [p>.1], or in the negative affective scale
(PANAS) [t(34)=.08, p=.93]. Therefore, any difference in
the performance at the task between the two groups can be
ascribed to the video presentation. Notably, the means
recorded in the PSS, for both groups, were above that of
Caucasian population
Decision under risk. In order to assess whether there was a
shift in risk-taking behaviour between the two groups due to
the experimental condition (relaxed vs. stressful situation),
leading to burnout
There are times at which you do nothing, and times at which you process 20 flights in one hour. And you wear yourself out with stress 'cause the structure is lacking. [Xavier, 10 /10/14] The problem is not the line or the crowded moment (WS), it is the lack of job resources (JS).
Second, it is important to highlight the crucial role of
emotions and emotion management. Psychological studies
found positive emotions mediating work engagement, and
negative ones associated with burnout and hindrance job
demands
Turning to the empirical context at hand, ethnographic research found security guards' work environment as sensorially distressing; characterized by overtimes, low wages, and diffused job insecurity, as well as by contradictory pressures, high responsibility (both legal and felt), and elevated work control.
It's tough for the tension, for the management you must– I mean, you have one thousand control procedures, it's not that you say “It’s like working as a bar-tender, I make coffee, I greet Tony, I wash”. And we're controlled for everything. [Joan, 11/05/14] Furthermore, guards have to deal with passengers’ resistance to control procedures, and this means engaging in emotional labour and refraining oneself from answering in kind to resisting and/or rude (“unruly”) passengers.
Pressure, responsibility, control and related emotion
management, alongside interaction with passengers, make
airport security a deeply emotionally-charged context —not
only for passengers
On the one hand, guards should be accurate and thorough in
controlling passengers and their belongings but, at the same
time, they should provide a nice, possibly brief experience
for airport customers. A first contradiction, therefore, has to
do with (public) security’s vs. (private) profit’s logics and
ends. Salter (2007: 61) talks of detection vs. flow.
“They tell you: ‘There’s the line, go on!’ What does it mean go
on?!!”, Leonard rhetorically asks me. Pressure for avoiding line
formation, he explains, starts from airport management and
descends towards private security managers, shift-chiefs,
supervisors, until screening guards. [fieldnotes, 05/15/13]
Another contradiction has to do with the role of
passengers per se. Until further proof, they are citizens to be
protected, customers to satisfy, but they can also be potential
threats to the system. And what does constitute such proofs?
Here issues of discretion, autonomy and expertise are
pivotal
Olive describes the job as subject to much pressure […] and
endowed with very little autonomy. Personal initiative, and the
consequent use the guard may make of her/his experience,
competence and expertise, are discouraged, she explains. [...] If
somebody makes something click in me, maybe he has an
attitude- I don’t know, that I see something, I notice something, I
cannot anyway decide to manually search him. [...] She says that
the same goes for patting: [a middle manager] wants us to pat in
only one and the same way. He wants little soldiers, only the
procedure counts. On the contrary, we should pat as we think
it’s better, for using one’s experience and for feeling at ease in
performing a task which, anyway, is embarrassing. [...] “This is
certainly not the way to work well!”, she repeats several times,
and adds that the [middle manager] even writes you a note if he
sees you’re patting in a different way. [fieldnotes, 05/04/13]3
Such a control is heavily felt, and –even for those most
engaged with their work
Like I've always said, I like the job. The only thing are the hours [...] the shifts, they're the only thing that make us feel bad sometimes. [Lucretia, 10/07/14] “I like the job, but the wage is low and, especially, there’s much pressure —and for even 11 or 12 hours per day!” [...] she explains pressure means responsibility, but also and especially (a) control by managers and (b) mandatory overtimes: “honestly, at the tenth hour, I make everything pass, I don’t give a shit anymore! After 10 hours that you repeat the same sentences, that you press this button...”. [fieldnotes, 05/28/13] A further job-related stressor consists in sanctions like the notes mentioned by Olive, or “contestation letters”: The guards, Peter says, are too much controlled, and receive contestation letters for whatever. He adds that any trust by the employer is missing, and this doesn’t help. [fieldnotes. 10/23/13] Such letters, which have actual impact on guards’ earnings and career, may be sent by the employer for various reasons, among which “unkindness” towards passengers. (Unruly) Passengers and emotion management The contradiction between detection and flow, security culture and consumer/customer one, comes in plain sight in presence of the so-called “unruly” passengers: i.e., passengers who are unwilling to be checked, who do not collaborate and/or protest, who are rude and variously offend or insult guards. Most of “unruly behaviours” can be seen as practices of resistance on the part of the passengers. Records range from nonverbal conduct:
He was grumbling with his nose; he had printed on his face and bodily posture an air of superiority with respect to everything around him; he was parading —I would dare saying— boredom, 3 In fieldnotes excerpts, direct speech between inverted commas and indirect speech in italics.
4 They are mandatory since the airport security service is normatively framed as a public service (like police work). annoyance and contempt for the procedures people around him were engaged in. [fieldnotes, 04/24/13]
Besides me an elderly heterosexual couple quarrels while packing after the security check. A hostess who is waiting for conducting them to the gate (they are the last passengers of their flight to embark), solicits them. The man swiftly replies: “Tell that to the Custom, here!”, and points with his chin towards the security guards behind him. [fieldnotes, 05/09/13]
A woman says loudly to her husband, in Italian, with disgusted voice: “In Moldavia there’s no such thing, only in Italy!”. [fieldnotes, 05/09/13] While passing through, passengers of a private flight complain about, and make fun of security control: e.g., “Then one should pass naked.” “Eh, we’re close.” [fieldnotes, 07/16/13] To rude, coarse, offensive passenger:
The man refuses [to undergo a procedure] and pretends he knows the norm and the guard is wrong. The guard stays calm and eventually succeeds in having the man doing what she asked. At the end of that, he asks with ironic and paternalistic tone: “That’s okay?”. “That’s okay, thank you. Next time remember to separate liquids”, she answers in a robot-like manner. “Next time I will bring you the regulation!” he replies raising his voice while walking away. [fieldnotes, 07/06/2013] Alan has to trash the 150 ml. bottle of perfume of a British passenger who [...] merely replies with a “Fuck off” in his mother tongue. [fieldnotes, 08/01/13]
In front of all these behaviours, security operators feel unprotected: “We’re nobody, therefore we must suffer in silence the rudeness of some passengers”. The only chance is learning to manage one's emotions.
It happens also to those who are kind: you find the passenger who insults and offends you […] You try to act as if nothing has happened, you let it go, even if maybe you feel bad, I mean, at the beginning I felt bad when they... Then you must grin and bear it, though. [Leon, 07/31/14]
Finally, it is worth noticing that issues of felt responsibility and connected emotion work are pivotal not only with regard to threat detection, but also with respect to passenger-guard interaction and related decision-making.
If there's an aspirin, and I see there's an old lady, then the question is: Do you let her pass with the aspirin or do you act “rigidly”? So, maybe you let her bring it after asking some questions, having understood if and why she deems important to carry the aspirin with her, and maybe you also make her taste it. There, in making such decisions, the emotional aspect becomes heavier, precisely in taking such judgement calls. And maybe there are colleagues who slavishly follow norms, but I prefer to judge case by case, because, I mean, I definitely have to manage this emotional aspect of... humanity. Maybe the passenger is going to a funeral, maybe she has never flown out, she is scared... [Lucretia 10/07/14]
What we have defined as WS in the previous section pretty
much equals what has been defined situated stress in the
experiment. As for JS, the latter was not designed to
distinguish job-related vs. extra-job stress. Further research
is needed to clearly assess the import of the two. However,
since ethnographic research was conducted with the very
same subjects of the experiment, we can reasonably say that,
for most of them, non-situated stress stems from job-related
aspects (even when there are personal stressors, their effect
is exacerbated by the interaction with job-related factors).
With this is mind, we analysed data on Perceived Stress
Scale of each participant and divided them in two further
groups: those with the average on PSS above (high stress,
HJS) and below (low stress; LJS) the mean of Caucasian
population
First, independently from the WS conditions, participants in HJS showed higher scores to the PANAS, both pre and post the video presentation. Between the two, those in RS (condition B) seem to reduce more their negative emotions (PANAS) after the video presentation. Also, HJS appears to be related to other variables such as sex, age and work experience (more females, lesser age and work experience).
Second, the amount of risky choices –that we may consider an issue in the context of security– is higher with HJS (conditions A, B), when, moreover, the time of choice is shorter; instead, risky choices are at the lowest and decision time is longer when there is WS but not JS (condition C). Thus, there seems to be a positive effect of WS –intended as situated, critical-situation-grounded stress– on work performance –intended as considered choices– that vanishes, however, when JS is present too. In this case, and WS comes into play, decisions are made with the typical “rush” of the unexperienced who faces critical situations: in highly risky and less pondered ways.
Third, as for emotional response with respect to choice outcome –whose effects we can fairly assume on learning as well as future choice behaviour–, we see once more the negative effect of JS, especially in critical situations: condition A presents the highest level of task detachment (possibly extendable to work disengagement, further research needed), whereas condition C shows the highest level of task involvement. In the latter case, indeed, positive vs. negative outcomes produce clearly distinct positive vs. negative emotions accordingly, with higher happiness for wins if the choice was risky (I've guessed right) rather than safe (It went as expected), and lesser sadness after losses if it was safe (I've done my part anyway) instead of risky (I'm guilty). On the contrary, when WS adds to already existing JS, outcomes produce the least degree of emotions, no matter the choice riskiness; the distance between after-win vs. after-loss emotional status is the least in this condition. Unfortunately, we were not able to perform statistical analyses on these data, given the unbalanced and reduced number of participants in each group. However, we believe these preliminary insights open an interesting research avenue thanks to the interdisciplinary integration of experimental data and ethnographic analysis. Further studies should distinguish job-related from extra-job stress, better control for the four conditions, enlarge the sample, compare work settings to improve generalizability, and consider work performance also beyond decision-making.
In summary, this study highlighted the interaction between stress and risky decision-making in individuals trained to face stress in their daily work, and importantly, it suggested promising new avenues of research on the interaction between different kinds of stress and decisional processes. For instance, even when people are trained to face WS, when JS is also present, it can encumber their preparedness to react. This is an aspect that should be taken into serious consideration by policy makers.
Authors are supported by the VisCoSo project grant (Autonomous Province of Trento, “Team 2011” scheme).