Occupational Stress

Organizational Strategies for Handling Occupational Stress

The daily conflicts and dynamics of the business world are not just reflected across the market place, but within the organizations themselves. With the World Health Organization stating occupational stress as a worldwide epidemic (Avey, Luthans, & Jensen, 2009), taking control over its effects is vital. Human Resource Management (i.e. HRM) has a very critical objective of managing its employees’ psychological capitals, which could be briefly summarized in four features, namely confidence, hope, optimism, and resilience (Luthans, Luthans, & Luthans, 2004). However, that is not an easy objective, when stress emerges frequently. Heavy workloads, uncertainty about job opportunities, and long working hours are identified by Americans as major stress sources (Avey, Luthans, & Jensen, 2009). According to researches, typically, 20% of payroll of an organization is allocated for managing problems related to stress (Riga, 2006).

The objective of this research is to determine an appropriate approach that would reduce occupational stress symptoms by enhancing the culture of the organization, and opening up the communications between high-level managers and employees.

I- Literature Review

A- Background Knowledge

Occupational stress has recently grown, due to the dynamic working environment, where it has become one of the most important health problems in the modern world (Vokić & Bogdanić, 2007).

Erkutlu and Chafra (2006) related stress to “situations where the well-being of individuals is detrimentally affected by their failure to cope with the demands of their environment” (p. 287).

In the table below, Cooper and Marshall have created a model for stress at work. It is organized according to the sources of stress at work, individual characteristics, symptoms of occupational stress and corresponding disease. (1976)

Hence, stress is a very common phenomenon that an employee could experience. It is...