What, then, are some of the shared personality characteristics of someone in IT? The two prominent ones are high need for recognition and praise, and the lowest social need of any group. The third one is that IT people tend to be almost exclusively "Type A" personalities.

Is part of that stress due to insufficient communication skills? Certainly. It goes back to the low social need ' IT people don't really feel comfortable dealing with many other people. And so you combine that with our tendency to give our computers human characteristics, and if you look at a lot of us we talk to our computers like they are people. The problem is, if you have this personal relationship with the machine -- and you know your boss does the same thing -- when your boss sends you an e-mail it's his way around having to talk to you.

How do you recognize stress in your employees and how can you tell when they are under too much of it? People that are under stress have certain manifestations of that. They tend to be less emotionally stable. They tend to react strongly to small things that they might not react to under other circumstances. A change in schedule may be a crisis if somebody is really stressed. Those are characteristics to look for. They tend to make more mistakes, although I'm not sure that's a clear enough indicator because people make mistakes for other reasons. But people who are under high levels of stress tend to be less focused on the job.

What is the relationship between stress and the quality of the work? In a software development environment, the higher a person's stress, the lower the quality of their product. There is approximately a 15 percent correlation between stress level and quality. It's an inverse relationship ' as stress goes up quality goes down.

What can an IT manager do to alleviate some of this? An IT manager can be sensitive to his employees' situations. And one of the things you can do is use the "management by walking around technique" and know what your people are facing. A lot of stress isn't necessarily job stress. You can't alleviate personal stress, but if you are sympathetic or emphatic it may help a little bit. You can give people time to deal with the things that are causing them problems. You can assure that your people work a normal work week -- and you probably need to enforce that periodically by telling someone to go home.