Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews
Abstract Workplace stress is often considered to be negative, yet lab studies on individuals suggest that not all stress is bad. There are two types of stress: distress refers to harmful stimuli, while eustress refers to healthy, euphoric stimuli that create a sense of fulfillment and achievement. T...
| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Nature Portfolio
2023-01-01
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| Series: | Scientific Reports |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26796-6 |
| _version_ | 1828051793499652096 |
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| author | Sanja Šćepanović Marios Constantinides Daniele Quercia Seunghyun Kim |
| author_facet | Sanja Šćepanović Marios Constantinides Daniele Quercia Seunghyun Kim |
| author_sort | Sanja Šćepanović |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Abstract Workplace stress is often considered to be negative, yet lab studies on individuals suggest that not all stress is bad. There are two types of stress: distress refers to harmful stimuli, while eustress refers to healthy, euphoric stimuli that create a sense of fulfillment and achievement. Telling the two types of stress apart is challenging, let alone quantifying their impact across corporations. By leveraging a dataset of 440 K reviews about S &P 500 companies published during twelve successive years, we developed a deep learning framework to extract stress mentions from these reviews. We proposed a new methodology that places each company on a stress-by-rating quadrant (based on its overall stress score and overall rating on the site), and accordingly scores the company to be, on average, either a low stress, passive, negative stress, or positive stress company. We found that (former) employees of positive stress companies tended to describe high-growth and collaborative workplaces in their reviews, and that such companies’ stock evaluations grew, on average, 5.1 times in 10 years (2009–2019) as opposed to the companies of the other three stress types that grew, on average, 3.7 times in the same time period. We also found that the four stress scores aggregated every year—from 2008 to 2020 —closely followed the unemployment rate in the U.S.: a year of positive stress (2008) was rapidly followed by several years of negative stress (2009–2015), which peaked during the Great Recession (2009–2011). These results suggest that automated analyses of the language used by employees on corporate social-networking tools offer yet another way of tracking workplace stress, allowing quantification of its impact on corporations. |
| first_indexed | 2024-04-10T19:43:45Z |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj.art-0666cdb1c4164e33885e68e25bb3fcd6 |
| institution | Directory Open Access Journal |
| issn | 2045-2322 |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-04-10T19:43:45Z |
| publishDate | 2023-01-01 |
| publisher | Nature Portfolio |
| record_format | Article |
| series | Scientific Reports |
| spelling | doaj.art-0666cdb1c4164e33885e68e25bb3fcd62023-01-29T12:09:49ZengNature PortfolioScientific Reports2045-23222023-01-0113111010.1038/s41598-022-26796-6Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviewsSanja Šćepanović0Marios Constantinides1Daniele Quercia2Seunghyun Kim3Nokia Bell LabsNokia Bell LabsNokia Bell LabsGeorgia TechAbstract Workplace stress is often considered to be negative, yet lab studies on individuals suggest that not all stress is bad. There are two types of stress: distress refers to harmful stimuli, while eustress refers to healthy, euphoric stimuli that create a sense of fulfillment and achievement. Telling the two types of stress apart is challenging, let alone quantifying their impact across corporations. By leveraging a dataset of 440 K reviews about S &P 500 companies published during twelve successive years, we developed a deep learning framework to extract stress mentions from these reviews. We proposed a new methodology that places each company on a stress-by-rating quadrant (based on its overall stress score and overall rating on the site), and accordingly scores the company to be, on average, either a low stress, passive, negative stress, or positive stress company. We found that (former) employees of positive stress companies tended to describe high-growth and collaborative workplaces in their reviews, and that such companies’ stock evaluations grew, on average, 5.1 times in 10 years (2009–2019) as opposed to the companies of the other three stress types that grew, on average, 3.7 times in the same time period. We also found that the four stress scores aggregated every year—from 2008 to 2020 —closely followed the unemployment rate in the U.S.: a year of positive stress (2008) was rapidly followed by several years of negative stress (2009–2015), which peaked during the Great Recession (2009–2011). These results suggest that automated analyses of the language used by employees on corporate social-networking tools offer yet another way of tracking workplace stress, allowing quantification of its impact on corporations.https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26796-6 |
| spellingShingle | Sanja Šćepanović Marios Constantinides Daniele Quercia Seunghyun Kim Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews Scientific Reports |
| title | Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews |
| title_full | Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews |
| title_fullStr | Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews |
| title_full_unstemmed | Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews |
| title_short | Quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews |
| title_sort | quantifying the impact of positive stress on companies from online employee reviews |
| url | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-26796-6 |
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