3) Reason for Work Stress

 Source of Stress

1. The Environment: It includes weather, noise, crowding, pollution, traffic, unsafe environment, substandard housing, and crime.
2.  Physiological: adolescence, menopause, illness, aging, giving birth, accidents, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, and sleep disturbances.
3. Thoughts: The brain interprets and perceives situations as stressful, difficult, painful, or pleasant. Some situations in life are stress-provoking, but it is our thought that determines whether they are a problem.

These are the situations employees face.

 

Factors that contribute to the work stress

• 1 Work Overload

High levels of stressors like heavy workload and uncertainty about the supervisor’s expectations are associated with physical symptoms. Stress also gets caused when an employee does not fulfill the demand of the job and supervisor. Excessive workload and conflicting expectations are good examples of working conditions. There are several factors that cause stress in employees' jobs and these factors are job timings, pay, bonus, workload, and peer attitude. Workload, technological problems, higher targets, compensation and salary, outcomes of decisions, management, peer support behavior, and longer time frame are the main factors of causing stress in employees. Increase in designation, stress increases, and factors creating stress in employees are feeling undervalued, work-home interface, fear of joblessness, traumatic incidents at work, and economic instability.

• Role Conflict:

That role conflict refers to incompatible requirements and expectations that the employees receive from their supervisor or coworker. The individual must interact and hold conflicting expectations about that individual's behavior. There are differentiates three major types of role conflict. One type is the conflict between the person and the role. For example, a production worker and a member of a union are appointed to head up a new production team. This new team leader may not really believe in keeping close control over the workers and it would go against this individual’s personality to be hardnosed but that is what the head of the production would expect. The second type of intra-role conflict creates contradictory expectations about how a given role should be played. Finally, inter-role conflict results from differing requirements of two or more roles that must be played at the same time. For example, work roles and non-work roles are often in conflict. The role arises when more demands have been taken place upon the individual by peers, supervisors, and subordinates. Such type of stress is more dominant in jobs that have a lack of descriptions or unclear descriptions and these require conceptual thinking and decision-making.

• Role Ambiguity

Role ambiguity is another factor that leads to job stress, thus it occurs when the expectations, objectives, and responsibilities have not been clearly designed for employees. The employees become ambivalent to predict their supervisor’s reactions to their tasks as” success” or as” failure. Finally, long hours, work overload, time pressure, difficult or complex tasks, lack of breaks, lack of variety, and poor work conditions (for example, space, temperature, and light) are causes of occupational stress. 

• Performance 

Performance is the employee’s ability to produce work or goods and services according to the expected standards set by the employers, or beyond the expected standards. It defined performance as a measure of the quantity and quality of work done considering the cost of the resource it took to do the work. It is useful from a managerial standpoint to consider several forms of counterproductive behavior that are known to result from prolonged stress. It believes that specifically, regarding stress in the workplace, the stress ‘process’ often follows the notion of stress xxix as resulting from a misfit between an individual and their environment, where internal or external factors push the individual adaptive capacities beyond his or her limit. However, no two people react to the same job in the very same way, because personal factors also influence stress. For example, type personalities; people who are workaholics and who feel driven to be always on time and meet deadlines, normally place themselves under greater stress than others.

References

• Muhammad Ehsan & Kishwar Ali(2019) The Impact of Work Stress on Employee Performance: Based in the Banking Sector of Faisalabad, Pakistan [Online] Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335444048_The_Impact_of_Work_Stress_on_Employee_Productivity_Based_in_the_Banking_Sector_of_Faisalabad_Pakistan_1 [Accessed on 07.12.2022].