Occupational Stress: Causes and Management

Introduction Stress affects millions of people. One of the most common forms of stress is that related to our careers and the workplace. In today 's economic difficulty, work related stress is even more pronounced than ever before. Everyone who has ever held a job has, felt the pressure of work-related stress. Any job can have stressful elements, even if you love what you do. According to the American Psychological Association 's (APA) annual Stress in America Survey. Only 37 percent of Americans surveyed said they were doing

Society defines stress as anything which forces us to change. Through technical terms stress is defined as “a negative emotional state occurring in response to events that are perceived as taking or exceeding a person’s resources or ability to cope.” To explaining stress researchers came up with the “Cognitive appraisal model”, this system works to tell us whether we believe we have enough resources to deal with the situation without becoming stressed. For instance as a now college student those who have had previous experience taking finales in high school can have less stress than those who have not taken it. This is because they have previous experience with taking the tests and learning how to study while those who have never taken one can become extremely stressed over the unknown of the test. Stress is one of the sub branches that is attached to the world of health psychology. Health psychology is a quickly growing branch that deals with the way the mind and body work together. Psychologists that work in the health field came up with the biopsychosocial model. This model explains the complex interaction with biological, psychological, and social factors.

Attempts are made to keep employees focused by frequent staff meetings, but people only partially pay attention as managers announce company developments. Management’s perceived need to continually push employees to act right is apparent in the way they handles the missing cover page on Peter’s TPS report. Stress To study stress in the work place, researchers often measure the existing stressors being dealt with by employees. The stressors may be either physical or psychological demands to which an individual responds and, if chronic or persistent, can lead to negative reactions or responses called strains. Physical task stressors include excessive heat, noise, and light, as well as job demands such as a time-pressured work pace, heavier workload, and the amount of hours worked.

All employees working in the 21st century are faced with occupational stress at any one time. The main reason being the changes that occur globally, and they affect the growth of an organization. This will put a strain on the employees' workloads as they are monitored regularly to ensure they perform at

Stress can be caused by many different things within an organisation but the main causes of stress can be broken down into “six management standards” Anon (2009) how to tackle work related stress http://www.hse.gov.uk/ I used these areas to construct the chart below and discussed stress at a team meeting and asked my team to complete a Circle of influence around areas over which they felt they had no control Appendix 1 we also discussed what we / I could do to manage the six main causes of stress

Hakanen, J. J., & Bakker, A. B. (2017). Born and bred to burn out: A life-course view and reflections on job burnout. Journal Of Occupational Health Psychology, 22(3), 354-364. doi:10.1037/ocp0000053

Currie, D (2010). Introduction to Human Resource Management. 2nd ed. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel Development. 293

It is evident that the relationship between work stress and mental health has been established by numerous research studies. As discussed in Koesky (1993), the fact that all jobs involve some degree of stress makes it all the more alarming as to the level of stress experienced by individuals working in the human services. That is, given that these individuals are heavily involved in the lives of others, they often develop mental health symptoms that are characteristic of work-related stressors. In fact, “This involvement, which requires caring commitment and empathic responding, places workers at risk for a special type of strain commonly referred to as 'burnout'” (Koesky, 1993, p. 319).

In this paper I will discuss stress and the workplace stress survey from the American Institute of Stress and if left untreated, how it will negatively affect the workforce. I will explain the results of my survey scores and why I believe they are positive and negative. Additionally, I will describe personal examples of the stressors that are always at work and how to identify and overcome them before they cause irreparable damage.

We spend much of daily lives working. In fact, Americans spend about eight-times as many hours working as they do eating and drinking (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013). Approximately seven in ten Americans report that they experience symptoms of stress (Anderson, Belar, Breckler, Nordal, Ballard, Bufka, Bossolo & Bethune, 2013). Stress is elicited by a variety of psychological stimulus associated with our jobs, our residences, our social interactions, and the activities we engage in (p. 249, Franken, 2007). Many Americans live with the burden of an unsatisfying job as well as a stressful workplace. An online survey of 1,848 people in the United States, conducted by the American Psychological Association, found that 74 percent of

The article reviewed is called “Dealing with the Stressed: Workplace Stress Costs the Economy More Than $30 Billion a Year, and Yet Nobody Knows What It Is or How to Deal with It” by Ken Macqueen, with Martin Patriquin and John Intini. It begins with an excellent visual of the ‘cubie world’ many of use deal with on a daily basis. Authors describe a “fabric-covered box,” where “some troll in the IT department monitors your every keystroke,” and where your “boss is going to tug your electronic leash if he sees you leaving this early.” Stress? "Yet Nobody Knows What It Is." You just answered the question.

Any work environment can have stressful aspects that can negatively affect the employees’ performance and may lead to burnout. Oftentimes when employees are stressed or burnout their commitment at the job may begin to weaken and they may lose satisfaction. Many organizations have recognized that workers burnout is the result of aggravated chronic work stressors and embodied by enervation and inefficacy. This author will discuss the impact of stress and worker burnout on organizations. Moreover, this author will consider the implication of stress and worker burnout on the employee, as well as the short- and long-term productivity of a business.

According to Cavanaugh, Boswell, Roehling, and Boudreau (2000), organizational stress is an emotional feeling that results from external demands placed on an employee in a workplace setting. Therefore, it is critical that aspects in an organizational setting, which result in feelings of stress, are properly addressed (Cropanzano, Howes, Grandey & Toth, 1997). According to Narayanan, Menon, and Spector (1999), the traditional manner in which the construct of organizational stress is assessed, is via indirect reports in the form of surveys and questionnaires. However, traditional methods of assessment in the form of surveys and questionnaires, can often miss valuable information regarding which environmental variables are truly controlling the behavior (Kushwaha, 2014). Therefore, a behavioral analytic solution is needed on order to properly assess the broad construct of workplace stress.

Stress is a common issue that faces every human being in different times. Stress can be caused by many factors, but one of the main reasons is work which is called occupational stress or work-related stress. Job stress does not only affect the employees’ performance within an organization, but also it affects their general health. Stress has become a challenge for employers now because high level stress results in low productivity, increased absenteeism and other problems like alcoholism, drug abuse and hypertension (Ahmad, Mohamed. 2017). It became a major problem for employers especially in developing countries where they don’t realize the importance of work-life balance and the impact of stress on the productivity level and the job

A nonfiction paper that influenced me the most is the article written by Norito Kawakami and Takashi Haratani titled “Epidemiology of Job Stress and Health in Japan: Review of Current Evidence and Future Direction”. Since I was a young adult, I have always heard and known about the “karoshi” epidemic in Japan, however, this topic has never caught my attention until my ex-manager pulled me aside one day and had a conversation about of how worried and concerned he was of my health due to my work commitments. This conversation happened during the peak of my career growth, my manager saw potentials in me, and I was extremely interested, satisfied, and motivated with my roles and responsibilities. I was his best team player until he realized that I was working during the day with my coworkers and my teammate in the United States; while managing a team of software developers in India during off hours, I was on the fast track to implement a proprietary software for the Federal Sunshine Act regulation at the time.