Stress Takes Its Toll Mark Kelly had a lot of fun in University. He was a fairly good student, especially in math, he worked harder than most of his friends, and somehow he ended up going out with Shantel McKenzie, the valedictorian at the graduation. He worked summers for a surveyor, William Loude, and when he graduated Mr. Loude offered him a permanent job on one of his survey crews. The pay wasn't very high, but Mark already was good at the work, and he believed all he needed was a steady job to boost his confidence to ask Shantel to marry him. Once he did, events unfolded rapidly. He started work in June, he and Shantel were married in October, Shantel took a job as an Accountant in a small company that printed business forms, and a year later they had their first child. The baby came as something of a shock to Mark. He had come to enjoy the independence his own paycheck gave him every week. Food and rent took up most of it, but he still enjoyed playing football a few nights a week with his UTECH batch mates and spending Sunday afternoons on the cricket field. When the baby came, however, Mark's brow began to furrow a bit. He was only 23 years old, and he still wasn't making much money. He asked Mr. Loude for a raise and got ithis first. Two months later, one of the crew chiefs quit just when Mr. Loude's crews had more work than they could handle. Mr. Loude hated to turn down work, so he made Mark Kelly a crew chief, giving his crew some of the old instruments that weren't good enough for the precision work of the top crews, and assigned him the easy title surveys in town. Because it meant a jump in salary, Mark had no choice but to accept the crew chief position. But it scared him. He had never been very ambitious or curious, so he'd paid little attention to the specialized training of his former crew chief. He knew how to run the instrumentsthe basics, anywaybut every morning he woke up terrified that he would be sent on a job he couldn't handle. During his first few months as a crew chief, Mark began doing things that his wife thought he had outgrown. He frequently talked so fast that he would stumble over his own words, stammer, and have to start all over again. He began smoking, too, something he had not done since they had started seeing each other while at University. He told his two crew members that smoking kept his hands from shaking when he was working on an instrument. Neither of them smoked, and when Mark began lighting up in the truck while they were waiting for the rain to stop, they would become resentful and complain that he had no right to ruin their lungs too. Mark found it particularly hard to adjust to being "boss," especially since one of his workers was getting a Masters in Surveying degree through part time studies and both crew members were the same age as he. He felt sure that Marvin Peart, the scholar, would take over his position in no time. He kept feeling that Marvin was looking over his shoulder and began snapping any time they worked close together. Things were getting tense at home, too. Shantel had to give up her full-time day job to take care of the baby, so she had started a part-time accounting job working nights. They hardly ever saw each other, and it seemed as though her only topic of conversation was how they should move to the United States or Canada, where she had heard that surveyors were paid five times what Mark made. Mark knew his wife was dissatisfied with her work and believed her intelligence was being wasted, but he didn't know what he could do about it. He was disconcerted when he realized that drinking and worrying about the next day at work while sitting at home with the baby at night had become a pattern.

Case Questions

1. List all of the Organizational Behavior issues that you can identify in the case. List the issues in alphabetical order and bold and underline the three that you think are most important to the case. (10 marks)

1. What signs of stress was Mark Kelly exhibiting? (20 marks)

1. How was Mark Kelly trying to cope with his stress? Can you suggest more effective methods?

(20 marks