Background on Stress

INTRODUCTION BACKGROUND OF STUDY Work Related stress is a major cause of employee’s low productivity in an organisation. Encarta dictionary defines stress as strain felt by somebody mentally, physically, emotionally which may cause symptoms as raised blood pressure and depression. It is important to recognise and address properly job-related stress because it badly affects the employee’s mental and physiological health. As there is so many resources for employees to perform excellent in their jobs but there are also some factors that hinder their performance. These factors lead to their performance negatively.

Newman and Behr (1979) defined job stress as ‘a situation wherein job-related factors interact with the worker to change his or her psychological and or psychological condition such that the person is forced to deviate from normal functioning. Some reasons for stress at the workplace could be; inability to meet the demand of the job, building and maintaining an amiable relationship with colleagues, management of subordinate staff, imparting knowledge to others and taking works from them, excessive work pressure to meet deadlines, inability to be creative, change of job, sexual harassment.

These kind of work related stress results in poor performance by members of the organization. Attison (2002) says stress is a major factor in up to 80% of all work-related injuries and 40% of workplace turnovers. Despite tremendous advancement in science and technology and availability of various sources of luxury, majority of the workers in Ghana seem to be experiencing moderate to high degree of psychological stress in various spheres of their lives.

Job related-stress is also a serious cause of mental health and health-related injuries. David and Cooper (1981) discovered that workplace stress has been increasingly quoted as the main cause of accidents, job dissatisfaction and other psychological illnesses like heart attack, alcoholism and hypertension. WORK RELATED STRESS Well-designed, organised and managed work is good for us but when insufficient attention to job design, work organisation and management has taken place, it can result in Work related stress.

Work related stress develops because a person is unable to cope with the demands being placed on them. Stress, including work related stress, can be a significant cause of illness and is known to be linked with high levels of sickness absence, staff turnover and other issues such as more errors. Stress can hit anyone at any level of the business and recent research shows that work related stress is widespread and is not confined to particular sectors, jobs or industries.