Stress in the workplace

1. Stress in the workplace

2. Stress in the workplace
Work stress can be defined as:
• The adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other
types of demand placed on them at work,
• Workers experience stress when the demands of their job are
excessive and greater than their capacity to cope with them.

4. Causes of work stress
There are many causes of work-related stress, a number of which are listed
below:
• Poorly-organized work
• Changes at work
• Poor working relationships
• Poor communication at work
• Lack of personal control of work
• Ill-defined work roles
• Machine/process-paced work
• Dull, repetitive work

5. Causes of work stress continues
• Highly-demanding tasks
• The threat of violence
• Role in the organization
• Personality and coping strategy
• Career development
• Organizational culture and climate
• Insufficient training
• Home-work interface

6. Effects of work stress on individuals
• Stress affects people differently, what stresses one person may not
affect another. Factors like skills and experience, age or disability may
all affect whether an employee can cope

7. Introducing theories and models of stress
A number of theories have been developed to understand stress.
They vary in terms of their emphasis on physiological and psychological
factors and their description of the relationship between individuals
and their environment.
• Stimulus or response approaches
One way of categorizing stress is to consider it from a stimulus or
response approach.

8. • Stress as a stimulus (engineering)
Stress is caused by an event:
Analogy with engineering – pressure on a person produces strain.
Stress is seen as the person’s response to that strain.
But this theory may be too simple; it does not deal with cumulative
events.

9. • Stress as a response (physiological)
• Stress is a response to a situation, not the situation itself.
• Two key theories:
• Fight-flight response (Cannon 1932)
• General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) (Selye 1956)