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HBH220N Organisational Behaviour

Ms. Ki Yen Ping

April 4, 2014

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Occupational Stress What is occupational Stress? What are some of the specific

causes of occupational stress?

!Prepared by Paul Vincent Christopher Mosunallee (4235789)

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Occupational Stress, simply put, is work-related stress. According to WHO, the World

Health Organisation, they defined occupational stress as “Work-related stress is the response

people may have when presented with work demands and pressures that are not matched to

their knowledge and abilities and which challenge their ability to cope” (Stress at workplace

n.d.).

!Working is the major part of the cycle of life, occupational stress is not taken lightly as

it may results in affecting one’s life, his/her co-workers or his/her private life including

friends and families. Occupational stress mainly happens to blue and white collar workers

and it may results for a company’s low productivity, employees’ absenteeism, various

accidents during and off work. Occupational stress may also results in the demoralisation of

co-workers such as yawning is contagious, if one yawns in a room, the other persons in the

room will tend to yawn as well. In consequence, seeing a beloved co-worker going mad at

work, some people will tend to start questioning themselves, and as they will keep on

assessing and began to doubt themselves, they might end up stressing themselves, making

occupational stress a vicious circle.

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First, to understand the causes of work-related stress, we should take into consideration

how stress (normal stress) is caused. Dr Michie (2002, p.67) brilliantly explain that the cause

and degree of stress is dependent of two protective physiological mechanisms functionality.

The first mechanism is the “Alarm reaction” which is when we are presented to a threat to

our safety, the first response we will get is a physiological arousal: a rush of adrenaline to

tense our muscle and increase our heart rate and breathing so that we become more rapid into

either fighting or fleeing or in another words “Fight or Flight”, a widely known term coined

by Harvard Medical School professor and chairman, Dr. Walter B. Cannon on his studies and

research on acute stress response. The second mechanism “adaptation” allows us to no further

respond to the alarm reaction mechanism, i.e. when the stimuli is no longer a threat to our

safety. Stress is caused, it is experienced, when one of those physiological mechanisms fails,

or the switch from the alarm reaction mechanism to the adaptive mechanism is difficult.

!Now to the factors at workplace causing stress, in the United kingdom, the Health and

Safety Executive (HSE) has identified the six most common factors; Demands (ability to

cope with job demands), Control (ability to tell/ criticise or make a remark about their work),

Support (ability to receive information and support from co-workers and superiors.),

Relationships (not being subjected to inappropriate work-behaviours), Role (understanding of

the job role along with its responsibilities) and Change (involved in undergoing

organisational change).

!Should those factors not properly managed, it will lead to occupational stress; Kelloway

et al., 2008 (cited in Babatunde 2013, p.77) “Job-related stress has become a growing

concern because it is found to have significant implications for the organisations and bad

publicity” and the most prominent examples of the negative outcomes of occupational stress

and not being managed properly is the Foxconn Suicides. The poor working conditions, the

unsatisfactory monetary compensation, the overload of job demand lead that for the first

quarter of the year of 2010, a startling number of thirteen employees of Foxconn committed

suicide. The employees mostly coming from rural areas and whom are of age between 16-25

fid themselves confused and lost between expectations and reality, when actually they were

looking forward to a new state of age where they could provide to their families, but as

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demands when higher and managers putting more pressure onto the employees to get the

productivity to rise up, the young chinese man and woman from age 17 to age 24 choose to

end their life as suicide (Chan and Ngai 2010, p.9). There have been reported a total number

of 27 cases of suicide which had been reported from Foxconn as of 2011 and the story of

suicides spread like wildfire among the media scene hence engraving ‘bad’ across Foxconn,

making his shares falls down, and drastically reducing the chances of poaching new clients.

!Eustress, which literally means ‘good-stress’, is a term coined by Hungarian-born

endocrinologist Hans Selye. As he defined stress as “the non-specific response of the body to

any demand placed upon it” (Selye, 1987, p.17) he made the differentiation between distress

and eustress. The differentiation in turn brought the idea that when under and over stress

stimulation may lead to distress, so an optimal level of stress will lead to eustress, for

organisation this translates to efficiency and higher productivity.

!But despite ‘eustress’, when occupational stress occurs, organisations, if they decide to

act on it, will choose to make their environment a stress free zone. In Malaysia for example, a

study indicated that high workloads causes stressed among managers, and to tackle it,

organisations have cut down the working week from six to five days, but in most of the cases

the workload still remains the same (Manshor et al. 2003, p.625). Nevertheless, in a study on

intervention of stress-reducing, four types of interventions was standing alone. The analyses

of the study shows without no refutal that the most effective stress-intervention type is the

one that focuses on the individuals (Van Der Klink et al. 2001, p. 274).

!Hence, making a work environment stress-free, it improves the health of the employees,

making them stronger in morale, solidifying the organisational’s culture, and creating a team/

family spirit where the employees may have a sense of job-security and well-being. While

there might be debate on having an optimal stress level is better for an organisation rather

than having a stress-free zone, but in the most casual point of view, having an optimal stress

level is like gambling, the scale may state at the peak, where productivity is maximal, but it

may also easily tip off, where the employees may have too much stress and causes a snowball

effect of disasters.

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References:

A. Stress at the workplace n.d., WHO, viewed 13 March 2014,

< http://www.who.int/occupational_health/topics/stressatwp/en/ >

B. Michie, S 2002, ‘Causes and Management of Stress at Work’, Occup Environ Med, Vol.

59, No. 1, pp. 67-72

C. Causes of Stress n.d., HSE, viewed 26 March 2014,

< http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/furtheradvice/causesofstress.htm >

D. Babatube, A 2013, ‘Occupational Stress: A Review on Conceptualisations, Cause and

Cure’, Economic Insights - Trends and Challenges, Vol. 2, No. 3, pp.73-80

E. Chan, J, & Ngai, P 2010, ‘Suicide as Protest for the ew Generation of Chinese Migrant

Workers: Foxconn, Global Capital, and the State’, The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 37 No.

2, pp. 3-33

F. Selye, H 1987, Stress without Distress, Transworld, London

G. Manshor, AT, Fontaine, R, & Siong, CC 2013, ‘Occupational Stress among managers: a

Malaysian survey’, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Vol. 18, No. 6, pp. 622-628

H. Van Der Klink, JJL, Blonk, RWB, Schene, AH, and Van Dijk, FJH 2001, ‘The Benefits of

Interventions for Work-Related Stress’, American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 91, No.

2, pp 270-276

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