Identifying Problematic Stress With In Service Oriented

Businesses Essay, Research Paper

GRANT PROPOSAL

Proposed Project: Identifying problematic stress with in service oriented businesses

INTRODUCTION

Work can cause stress and also be affected by it. Stress causes many problems for American businesses today. One of the major sources of stress in a person’s life can be his or her job. Deadlines, problems with coworkers, boss trouble, and long hours can all contribute to feelings of being overwhelmed and helpless. Fortunately, there are ways to combat the stress that the workplace can bring. Often, researchers define stress as the psychological and physiological conditions that a person experiences when they perceive a situation as threatening, harmful, or demanding. This means that whenever we experience a change in our environment, we may experience stress. Whether we do or not depends on how we perceive the event.

So what is stressful for one person might not be for another. Many factors influence how you interpret events including. At a personal level, work stressors are related to depression, anxiety, general mental distress symptoms, heart disease, ulcers, and chronic pain (Sauter, Hurrell, & Cooper, 1989). Employees who are unable to exert control over their lives at work are more likely to experience work stress and are therefore more likely to have impaired health (see Sutton & Kahn, 1984) In general, job control is the ability to exert influence over one’s environment so that the environment becomes more rewarding and less threatening. Stress can come from many different sources. Stress from your personal life can also compound problems in the workplace. Thus, further research must address problematic stress with-in service oriented businesses in order to promote a productive, less aggravated, sounder, medium in the work place.

In the work place, service oriented jobs can be an extreme workload, not only in terms of number of hours of work expected, but also in terms of the complexity of the work and frequent change in work demands, sometimes associated with rapid advances in technology. Another is ambiguity as to the worker’s rights, responsibilities, status, and goals; with such role ambiguity, the worker may experience a sense of loss control and autonomy on the job. Insufficient resources to accomplish the job and administrative indifference or interference also create stress. The increased specialization of many jobs results in fragmentation of work. The worker is involved with only one small segment of producing the total product or providing services to the customer, a loss of sense of accomplishment and autonomy may result.

Thus, the purpose of this proposal is to identify stressful situations and issues that influence performance in the work place the results of the analysis will be used to enhance understanding of service oriented work stress issues as well as proactive and remedial solutions for aimed at this problem. Therefore, the study will have practical implications for training in identifying stressful situations and issues that influence performance in the work place. In addition, it will increase our theoretical understanding of the performance reducing stress agents that take place in the service-oriented businesses.

RATIONALE AND SIGNIFICANCE.

Job stress has been recognized as a major cause of health problems at work (Karasek & Theorell, 1990). A work-related problem of increasing concern is known as “burnout”. The topic began to gain attention in the mid-1970s with a book by Freudenberger (1974). Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary defines stress as “the result produced when a structure, system or organism is acted upon by forces that disrupt equilibrium or produce strain”. In simpler terms, stress is the result of any emotional, physical, social, economic, or other factors that require a response or change. It is generally believed that some stress is okay (sometimes referred to as “challenge”or “positive stress”) but when stress occurs in amounts that you cannot handle, both mental and physical changes may occur. Stress among employees within a service based business environment has been a study of interest since the early 1960s, researchers have been examining the psychosocial and physical demands of the work environment that trigger stress. Research has identified many organizational factors contributing to increased stress levels: (a) job insecurity; (b) shift work; (c) long work hours; (d) role conflict; (e) physical hazard exposures; and (f) interpersonal conflicts with coworkers or supervisors.

Stress in the workplace can have many origins or come from one single event. It can impact on both employees and employers alike (Canadian Mental Health Association, 1995). The New York-based American Institute of Stress reports that as many as 75 to 90 percent of visits to physicians are related to stress. (Paul J. Rosch, M.D., F.A.C.P. President, The American Institute of Stress). 43% of all adults suffer adverse health effects due to stress. Stress has been linked to all the leading causes of death, including heart disease, cancer, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis, and suicide. An estimated 1 million workers are absent on an average workday because of stress related complaints. Stress is said to be responsible for more than half of the 550,000,000 workdays lost annually because of absenteeism. (The Ame