Public Lecture:
Meeting Challenges at Work

Professor Darius K.S. Chan
Department of Psychology, CUHK

In the third public lecture of the series, Professor Darius Chan, Director of Industrial-Organizational Psychology Programme of our Department, delivered a talk on the management of work-related stress. Given the economic downturn in Hong Kong and recent changes in the organizational reality, employees are now facing various types of work-related problems, for instance, perceived job insecurity, increased workload, and gloomy promotion prospect. These problems can be very distressful to individual employees and costly to organizations.

Professor Chan introduced a framework to explain what work-related stress is from a psychological prospective. Based on his current research on the Hong Kong workforce, he explained the relationship between job insecurity, health condition and working attitudes. In his lecture, he highlighted the importance of optimism in strengthening individual's stress tolerance. His research findings reveal that the negative impact of job insecurity on the optimists was less pronounced than on the pessimists. He also gave some concrete suggestions to the audience about how they could successfully manage work-related stress.