Important Determinants of Job
Stress
Introduction
• Stress is the body's reaction to a change that requires a
physical, mental or emotional adjustment or response
(Wikipedia).
• The term stress was used and introduced to social
sciences by Hans (Selye in the year 1950).
• occupational stress is likely to be sustainable higher
amongst those occupations whose task is ‘person’
focused. Hingley and Cooper (1986)
• (Lazarus and Folkman, 1984; Edworthy, 2000) defined
job stress as the discrepancy between environmental
and situational factors in their work and employees’
capability and resources to handle them.
• When stress increases beyond the point, feelings of
frustration, anxiety and tiredness start to consume
energy and stress becomes dysfunctional and
detrimental to performance (Muse et al., 2003; Sullivan
and Bhagat, 1992).
Introduction (Contd.)
• Stress can be constructive or destructive.
• Constructive stress has a positive impact on
the employee. It gives a feeling of satisfaction
and self respect. Additionally it also increases
their interest in their work and opportunities for
rehearsing their creative ability.
• On the other hand destructive stress gives
negative results as far the performance of the
individual and organization is concerned. This
type of stress leads to decrease in performance
efficiency, work related carelessness.
Research Question and
Conceptual Frame Work
• Research Question:
• What are the important components of the Job Stress in
a university? Which component considered to be the
most important one?
Methodology
• We cannot directly observe the job stress level.
We usually rely on the self report of respondent
to measure the job stress level. For this purpose
we can use interview or rating scale
questionnaire.
• We
have preferred to use rating scale
questionnaire because when using interviews
some workers might not give an accurate
representation of their levels of job stress fearing
relationship from management.
Research Design
• This is a descriptive study. This study was
carried out at University of Management
and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan.
Basically the focus of this study is only
faculty (Lecturers, Assistant Processors,
Associate Professors, and Professors)
particularly from School of Business and
Economics.
Data Collection Instrument
• The main data collection instrument in this research
paper was questionnaire. The objective is to examine
patterns of relationship between the variables.
• The questionnaire used in this research has been
designed with the help of material given in Chapter 5 –
Job Stress by Dail I. Fields with some modifications.
• This questionnaire consisting of two pages and two
parts. First part consists of nine questions covering
demographic factors of the respondents. Second part
consists of a total of 25 statements which measure the
level of faculty’ stress. Every statement has a 5 point
likert scale from strong disagree to strong agree.
Study Population and sampling
• The total study population is more 150
faculty members. Fifty (50) questionnaires
were distributed in different schools of the
university (mostly in SBE). The response
rate is 82 percent. A total of 15
questionnaires were distributed among
females and 35 among males. Female
response rate is 73.33% (11
questionnaires) while male response rate
is 85.71% (30 questionnaires).
Data Processing Interpretation and
Analysis
•
•
•
SPSS
Factor Analysis
Factor Analysis helped us to reduce 25
variables into 4 variables.
–
–
–
–
Job Description Problems
Health and Self-Confidence
Work Place Environment
Organizaion’s Policies
Findings
• Results show that these four factors concludes
the 53.066% of the data.
• Job Description related problems play very
strong role to increase the job stress level
(29.279%).
• Health and Self-Confidence make another
9.668% contribution towards job stress level.
Similarly,
• Work Place Environment contributes another
6.912%
• Organization’s Policies makes it’s a cumulative
of 59.94% with a contribution of 6.873%.
Findings (Contd.)
• So, if we re-design our model it will look
like: