Understanding impact of stress on workplace outcomes using an agent based simulation

Many studies have shown that job related stress impacts workers' performance outcomes in diverse contexts; staff in universities, nursing staff in healthcare or social workers. Similar studies show that associates in support services organizations such as call centers are also impacted by stress; the job is demanding coupling tough requirements on task completion rates with low error rates. Sudden unanticipated spikes in work also contribute to increase in workload and thus to stress. Understanding the dynamics of how stress can impact outcomes can help managers to minimize risk of crisis situations while maintaining a team who are not overstressed. In this paper, we use an agent based simulation to study the dynamics of how stress and its different components, event stress, fatigue and time pressure impact outcome variables such as productivity or absenteeism. A key contribution of our work is that the agent behavioral model is grounded, i.e. each behavioral element which is a part of the agent model rests on empirical evidence. We also discuss our evolving ideas on how such models can be composed and finally show that the generated behavior of the agent model is close to reality.