Abstract

Stress in organization is a wide-spread phenomenon with far-reaching practical and economic consequences. High level of stress come at a high cost to organization as growing stress levels greatly affect employee performance as well as the bottom line. The purpose of the study was to establish the Occupational Stress and Employee Performance relationship between Stress and Employee and Employee Performance.

The study employed the descriptive cross sectional survey design. Correlation was used to establish the relationship between occupational stress and employee performance and testing of hypothesis. Triangulation method was used for both qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Stratified sampling was used to select a sample from each category of employees. The simple random sampling was used to select respondents from each category. The study adopted self-administered questionnaire. Findings revealed that occupational stress has a positive significantly influence on employee performance in behavior, emotion, and physiological.

The findings concluded that the level of occupational stress for this category of employees in the local authority is moderate and does affect their work performance. The study recommended that Limbe 1 Council should adopt strategies for managing employee occupational stress through reducing workload, emphasizing on delegation of activates.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Study

Occupational stress has been of great concern to employees and other stake holders of organization. Researchers agreed that stress is a serious problem in many organization (cooper and Cartwright). 1994: Varca, 1999, Omelas and Kleiner 2003. The cost of occupational stress is very high in many organizations in recent years. Occupational stress is a major issue for both employees an organizations in recent years. It is a common term used in life with most people having different understanding about its meaning. According to Topper (2007), stress is a person’s psychological respond to perception of demand and challenge. Nelson and Quick (1994) for example see stress as one of the most creatively ambiguous word, with many interpretation as there are many people who use the word as even the experts do not agree on that.

Stress is a common problem that affects almost all of us at some point in our lives. Tweeze (2005) stated that for two and half decades, stress phenomenon has become a topical issue in management development, seminars and workshops. He further stated that the popularity of stress stems from a number of obvious reasons.

Firstly, he stated that nobody is immured to stress, one can be caught up in a situation that causes or reduces stress in the individual. Thus as a part of human living, the young, old, the rich, the poor, and lay men alike are potential victims of stress. Secondly, since stress is viewed as the disease of growth and development, there is the search for the stress virtue in modern life. Further, he stated that traditional mechanism of handling the stresses and strains of living are fast breaking down. This is being caused by the factors of rapid urban development, increasing corporate regimentation of work life, breakdown of social support, increasing personal and group conflicts, including security threats to life and property.

The term stress was borrowed from the field of physics by one of the father of stress research Hans Seyle in (1936) when he define stress as the non-specific response of the body to any demand for change. Another definition of stress was drought forth by Robbin and Scinghi (2006), they defined stress as a dynamic condition in which an individual is confronted with an opportunity, constraint or demand related to what he/she desires and for which the outcome is perceive  to be both uncertain and important

Furthermore, oboegbulem (1995) stress is a felling which occurs when an individuals working or living conditions or circumstances make demands beyond his capacity to handle such a situation physically or emotionally. When a person is faced with disturbing situations, a change in his normal behavior is usually noticeable. Such an individual maybe faced with emotional, cognitive and physiological disruption which can disorganize and adversely affect his/ her power of reasoning.

Also, Halgin and White Bourne (2013) conceptualized stress as an unpleasant emotional reaction a person has when he/she perceives as event to be threatening. They started that this emotional reaction may include heightened physiological arousal due to increased reactivity of the sympathetic nervous system.

Generally stressors take many form such as: traumatic events, life demands, sudden medical emergencies and daily inconvenience. There also exist a variety of characteristic that a stressor may possess (different durations, intensity, predictability and controllability).

According to Eloviano, Kivimaki and Vahtera (2002), job stress reduces organizational performance. Usually, factors that cause job stress include long hours of work, heavy work load, change within the organization, tight deadline, changes to duties, job security, lack of autonomy, boring work.

Management has been defined in various ways by different authors. According to Esiekpe (2003) management simply imply the skill in dealing with something or to be in perfect control of a situation. Henry Fayol (1916) refers to management as the act of forecasting planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling.

Stress management according to Gale Encyclopedia (2008) it’s a set of techniques and program intended to help people deal more effectively with stress in their lives by analyzing the specific stressors and taking positive actions to minimize their effects. Another definition of stress management by Cohen and Lazarus (1979), they defined stress management as a problem-solving effort made by an individual faced with demands that are highly relevant to his welfare but taking his adaptive resources. Adaptive resources here involve coping method that people exhibit in order to be habituated with stress.

Stress management strategies has been developed to help people deal more effectively with stress in their life. Stress management strategy according to For Cooper (1986), it’s a measure taken to cope with trying period, so that a state of psychological and physiological equipment is re-established and subsequently maintained.

In stress management, no one technique or strategy is deemed to be successful for all individuals in all situation. There different techniques of stress management are categorized into three groups; the action Orientation Approach, Emotion Oriented Approach and the Acceptance Oriented Approaches.

1.2 Statement of the Problem

Occupational stress is a universal element and persons from nearly every occupation have face stress. Employees are critically analyzing the stress management issues that contribute to low performance of employees which originate from work overload. In today study’s work, employees are gradually working for long hours because of the high level of responsibility which causes them to stress a lot in order to meet up with expectations. Occupational stress has become one of the great concern for the management, employees and other stake holders of the organization. Occupational stress is considered to be one of the problem faced by employees because it can affect their level of performance and as such, it should be treated with care and attention.

Also, occupational stress needs to looked into because when employees are stressed they will not perform their job well and this will lower the organisaton overall performance and productivity. Furthermore, occupational stress is important to be solved because it will help the organization to measure its employee’s level of performance.

This problems will be solve using the method or means of questionnaires  which will be administered to some employees through random sampling and the data analyzed using the regression method of data analysis. The purpose of solving this problem statement is that, it will help in reducing the level of stress on the employees, it will equally help to increase organizational performance, and it will also help relate companies whose employees are stress to take measure in order to reduce its employee’s level of stress.

Limbe 1 Council also face problems like long hours of work, workload, general working conditions, workplace conflicts, workplace bullying, occupational group. Based on the problem faced by the Limbe 1 council this study is to carried out findings on how  Limbe 1 Council adopt their occupational stress management strategy,  in return better the performance of it workers and increase organizational output.

1.3 Research Questions

1.3.1 Main Research Question

The main research question of the study is:  What is the effect of occupational stress on employee performance of Limbe 1 council?

1.3.2 Specific Research Questions

The specific research questions are:

1. To what extent does emotional stress affect employee’s performance of Limbe 1 council?
2. How does physiological stress affect employee’s performance of the Limbe 1 council?
3. What is the effect of behavioral stress on employee’s performance of Limbe 1 council?

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