Stress In The Workplace

There is a level of stress that is good, but when it becomes excess it hampers our productivity and performance resulting in mental and physical changes. “Stress is an expected human response to challenging or dangerous situations” (Mind health connect, 2015). This response can be both positive and negative and can affect the individual both on and off the job. Workplace stress “is the harmful physical and emotional response that can happen when there is a conflict between job demands on the employee and the amount of control an employee has over meeting these demands (Canadian center for occupational health and safety, 2017). “Approximately 74% of employees reported stress in the workplace, a number that has increased to more than 14% one …show more content…
When this happens, employee’s performance become very poor, they have lost the enthusiasm to work, they become depressed; thus, resulting in low productivity, and more job-related errors. Therefore, employers would have to pay more money into health care benefits. These results coincide with many of our interviewees who said, "They sometimes make a lot of mistakes on the job because they have too much work to do in a limited time." Hence, the development of occupational health psychology being first realized by Hugo Muster berg and Jonathan Ramond. They took workers safety and accidents into consideration and worked on ways to combat the harmful effects of stress on …show more content…
Also, role ambiguity and role conflict can cause stress in the work environment. Employees that are unaware of their roles in an organization can develop stress in the workplace. Furthermore, burnout and workaholism are also linked to stress in the workplace. Burnout is “a state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion caused by excessive and prolonged stress” (Burnout prevention and recovery, n.d.). The types of employees that are likely to encounter burnout on their jobs are those that are devoted to their work. They display this by taking work home with them or by coming into the office on weekends to get work completed. From the interview conducted, workers were asked this question. Do you spend most of your time on the job? The responses that were retrieved revealed that many of the workers spend much of their time on the job which prevented them from spending time with family and friends. Workaholism was viewed as a “So- called addiction to work because of anxiety and insecurity or because of a genuine liking for the job” (Schultz & Schultz, 2010, p.299). Employees regarded as workaholics are those that are addicted to their jobs. In the workplace, there are healthy and unhealthy workaholics. The unhealthy workaholics are those workers that have the tendency to be unhappy and displeased with their jobs.

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