1. Abstract
The nature of work is changing at high speed, which disturbs our physical and mental
equilibrium causing our bodies to be frequently in a defensive action. This poses a threat
to the health of workers and, in turn, to the health of organizations. Nowadays, work-
related stress is a topic of active research and is considered as a requirement for
organizations seeking professionalism.
The objective of this project was to develop and identify job stressors in order to reduce
the riskof job-related illnesses.Work-related stress is widely linked to avariety of physical
and mental disorders. Accordingly, a questionnaire involving workers’ self-reports of job
characteristics and health complaints was used to conduct an occupational stress
research. The American National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has
developed a so-called The Generic Job Stress Questionnaire. This diagnostic instrument
was designed to be modular in form so that the stress researcher can select between
using the entire instrument or only using individual scales of interest. The modules are
used to investigate 13 job stressors; e.g. conflict at work, job requirements, job
satisfaction, workload and responsibility, physical environment and problems at work.
As a result of its success, the NIOSH’s questionnaire was translated to many languages
but not Arabic. Therefore, the firstpart of this project was translating this instrument into
Arabic language and verifying it by the aid of translators. Then it was implemented in the
second part of the project to evaluate job environment in the Jordanian firms. A local
organization cooperated to conduct a study of their workplace using a survey selected
from The NIOSH Generic Job Stress Questionnaire.
When studying the job satisfactioninthe localorganization, 84.6% of employees reported
that they are satisfied with their current jobs. On the other hand, workload and
responsibility module showed that 46.2% of the employees experience high and very high
amount of workload. Furthermore, employees occupying managerial positions feel that
their co-workers expect too much from them as compared to those with non-managerial
positions. Moreover, the employees with managerial positions reported higher levels of
self-confidence as compared to other employees within the organization. Females,
however, were noticed to have poor self-worth as compared to their male peers.
Unfortunately, due to our small sample size (n=26), all mentioned relationships were
statistically insignificant (p>0.1).
For the importance of this area of study, this verified instrument for assessing job stress
was presented in the Arabic language. Hopefully, further efforts using this version of the
questionnaire will be applied in Jordanian and regional organizations for the sake of
implementing a preventive approach to occupational stress.