Causes of work stress pdf

US labor 10force. The workplace can be a key location for activities designed to improve well-being among adults. Workplace wellness programs can identify those at risk and connect them to treatment and put in place supports to help people reduce and manage stress.

By addressing mental health issues in the workplace, employers can reduce health. Stress can occur in many different places in your life. Often times something that is stressful in one part of your life can cause stress in other parts, too. This falls in the arena of assertive communication. The second adaptive mechanism allows us to cease responding when we learn that stimuli in the environment are no longer a threat to our safety.

For example, when we first spend time in a house near a railway line, our response to trains hurtling past is to be startled, as described above. Over time, our response dwindles. If this process did not function, we would eventually collapse from physical wear and tear, and mental exhaustion.

Stress is experienced when either of these mechanisms are not functioning properly or when we find it difficult to switch appropriately from one to another. This forms the basis of individual approaches to stress management fig 2.

Figure 2 shows that it is the perception, or appraisal, of the situation that is key to whether or not it causes stress. These appraisals have been shaped by past experiences of confronting stress and, in turn, influence future behaviour and appraisals.

Thus, the process of appraisal, behaviour, and stress is continuous, and managing stress can result from changing the way the situation is appraised cognitive techniques or responded to behavioural or cognitive techniques.

The workplace is an important source of both demands and pressures causing stress, and structural and social resources to counteract stress. The workplace factors that have been found to be associated with stress and health risks can be categorised as those to do with the content of work and those to do with the social and organisational context of work fig 1.

Those that are intrinsic to the job include long hours, work overload, time pressure, difficult or complex tasks, lack of breaks, lack of variety, and poor physical work conditions for example, space, temperature, light. Unclear work or conflicting roles and boundaries can cause stress, as can having responsibility for people. The possibilities for job development are important buffers against current stress, with under promotion, lack of training, and job insecurity being stressful.

There are two other sources of stress, or buffers against stress: relationships at work, and the organisational culture. Managers who are critical, demanding, unsupportive or bullying create stress, whereas a positive social dimension of work and good team working reduces it.

On the other hand, a culture of involving people in decisions, keeping them informed about what is happening in the organisation, and providing good amenities and recreation facilities reduce stress.

Organisational change, especially when consultation has been inadequate, is a huge source of stress. A systematic review of the evidence for work factors associated with psychological ill health and associated absenteeism 3 Michie and Williams , unpublished data found the key factors to be:. Three of these factors form part of the influential control-demand model of work related strain.

On the other hand, high job demands with high decision latitude gives the possibility of motivation to learn, active learning, and a sense of accomplishment.

Of the two, decision latitude has been found to be more important than demand. As is evident from figs 1 and 2, individuals differ in their risk of experiencing stress and in their vulnerability to the adverse effects of stress.

Individuals are more likely to experience stress if they lack material resources for example, financial security and psychological resources for example, coping skills, self esteem , and are more likely to be harmed by this stress if they tend to react emotionally to situations and are highly competitive and pressured type A behaviour.

The association between pressures and well being and functioning can be thought of as an inverted U, with well being and functioning being low when pressures are either high or very low for example, in circumstances of unemployment.

Different people demonstrate different shapes of this inverted U, showing their different thresholds for responses to stress. A successful strategy for preventing stress within the workplace will ensure that the job fits the person, rather than trying to make people fit jobs that they are not well suited to. Increasingly, the demands on the individual in the workplace reach out into the homes and social lives of employees. Long, uncertain or unsocial hours, working away from home, taking work home, high levels of responsibility, job insecurity, and job relocation all may adversely affect family responsibilities and leisure activities.

This is likely to undermine a good and relaxing quality of life outside work, which is an important buffer against the stress caused by work. In addition, domestic pressures such as childcare responsibilities, financial worries, bereavement, and housing problems may affect a person's robustness at work. Thus, a vicious cycle is set up in which the stress caused in either area of one's life, work or home, spills over and makes coping with the other more difficult.

Women are especially likely to experience these sources of stress, 7 since they still carry more of the burden of childcare and domestic responsibilities than men.

In addition, women are concentrated in lower paid, lower status jobs, may often work shifts in order to accommodate domestic responsibilities, and may suffer discrimination and harassment.

Most interventions to reduce the risk to health associated with stress in the workplace involve both individual and organisational approaches. Individual approaches include training and one-to-one psychology services—clinical, occupational, health or counselling. They should aim to change individual skills and resources and help the individual change their situation. Stress usually builds up gradually.

The more stress builds up, the more difficult it is to deal with. A wide variety of training courses may help in developing active coping techniques—for example, assertiveness, communications skills, time management, problem solving, and effective management. However, there are many sources of stress that the individual is likely to perceive as outside his or her power to change, such as the structure, management style or culture of the organisation.

It is important to note that stress management approaches that concentrate on changing the individual without changing the sources of stress are of limited effectiveness, and may be counterproductive by masking these sources. For example, breathing deeply and thinking positively about a situation causing stress may make for a temporary feeling of well being, but will allow a damaging situation to continue, causing persistent stress and, probably, stress to others.

The primary aim of the individual approach should be to develop people's skills and confidence to change their situation, not to help them adapt to and accept a stressful situation. The prevention and management of workplace stress requires organisational level interventions, because it is the organisation that creates the stress.

An approach that is limited to helping those already experiencing stress is analogous to administering sticking plaster on wounds, rather than dealing with the causes of the damage. An alternative analogy is trying to run up an escalator that's going down!

Organisational interventions can be of many types, ranging from structural for example, staffing levels, work schedules, physical environment to psychological for example, social support, control over work, participation. The emphasis on the organisation, rather than the individual, being the problem is well illustrated by the principles used in Scandinavia, where there is an excellent record of creating healthy and safe working environments 3, 8 box 3.

Box 3 : Principles of preventing work stress in Scandinavia. Technology, work organisation, and job content are designed so that the employee is not exposed to physical or mental strains that may lead to illness or accidents. Forms of remuneration and the distribution of working hours are taken into account. Work should provide opportunities for variety, social contact, and cooperation as well as coherence between different working operations.

Working conditions should provide opportunities for personal and vocational development, as well as for self determination and professional responsibility. The analysis of stressful hazards at work should consider all aspects of its design and management, and its social and organisational context. A detailed account of how to assess and reduce risk associated with exposure to stressful hazards is summarised in box 4. Box 4 : A risk assessment strategy—six stages 9. Table 7 contains a listing of the stress statements which Type III officers were less stressful than their counterparts in the other two Types.

Essentially, they were less stressful of internal and external stressors. It appeared, relative to the other two types, they were more acclimated to the job. Type III officers were more cognizant of others' problems, and considered police-related activities and most internal problems less stressful than did other officers.

They, however, considered policies and procedures which were unfair or useless to be more stressful. These officers appeared to better understand the job and how to "get along" in the system. Violanti hypothesized that stress and police cynicism were parallel processes, and officers after several years of service enter into an introspection stage whereby they are more secure in their jobs and worry less about failure and the demands of the job.

Violanti observed that the introspection stage came after 20 years service, however the officers in this study appeared to enter this stage after t2 years of service.

The purposes of the study were to identify and describe perceived stress patterns, to observe differential characteristics in the patterns, and to determine whether certain demographic characteristics tend to be associated with a given pattern. In other words, what is the nature of the person-environment fit in police organizations? The analysis revealed three distinct groups of officers based on their responses to stress statements. The stress patterns for the three Types are: 1.

Type I. These officers were more stressful of negative events or criticism of their job performance organizational stressors. They were less stressful of police activities or tasks task-related stressors. Type II. These officers were more stressful of police activites or tasks task-related stressors and less stressful of possible negative actions by superiors or disciplinary actions organizational stressors.

Type II1. These officers appeared to be more stressful over the problems, criticism and negative administrative actions of their co-workers. They perceived working conditions and performing police duties as being less stressful. Type I and Type II appear to be somewhat opposites of each other where each Type feels less stressful of that which the other type is more stressful. Moreover, there are some differences in the demographic make-up of the two types.

Most of the younger patrol officers factored into Type I. Female patrol officers tended to exhibit Type II patterns, while other females females assigned to non-patrol units were inclined to express the Type I view. Type III officers, on the other hand, appeared to have learned to cope with the job.

Their perceived stressors involve the inappropriate activities of their co-workers. These findings tend to indicate that experience and current job assignment have pronounced effects on how one views stress in the organization. Heretofore, much of the police stress research has focused on the causes of stress and treated police officers in a global fashion. The focus of this research has been on the causes of police stress while its differential effects have been, to a degree, neglected.

There is no universalistic police personality; different police officers respond to various stressors differentially using a variety of coping and adjustment mechanisms. As shown in this study, some officers are less stressful over certain stressful events than others.

There are two hypotheses which may explain these differences among the officers. First, officers are predisposed to react to certain job characteristics. Personality traits cause officers to react differentially to various specific job events. Second, police officers may adjust to the requirements of the job. That is, an officer may be stressful with one set of job events when assigned to patrol, and when transferred to another unit, the officer begins to perceive new or other job events as being stressful.

The latter explanation may best describe the police stress process. The degree of actual stress resulting from police work remains highly debatable. However, if assignment- specific patterns of stress are present in police departments, it would indicate that police stress is composed primarily of numerous low level stressors as opposed to high-intensity stressors.

Future research must attempt to better identify stress patterns and take differences into account when assessing the stress problem and coping responses. At a higher plane, there is a need to determine if police agencies which use different styles of policing exhibit distinct stress patterns. There is a need for research to determine why some officers are stressful over some job events while other officers are stressful as the result of another set of events.

Moreover, there may be different coping patterns among officers, and the discovery of these coping patterns would be the key to understanding and reducing police stress. Stress reduction programs cannot be successful unless these individual differences are taken into account.

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