What is work stress? What are the causes of work stress?

Stress is a dynamic condition in which an individual confronted with an opportunity, constraint, or demand related to what he or she desires and for which the outcome is perceived to be both uncertain and important.

Stress is a condition of strain on one’s emotions, thought processes and physical conditions that seem to threaten one’s ability to cope with the environment. Stress may be termed as pressure or it is tension that is created by pressure. It always gives an unpleasant feeling.

Stress has been defined as a poor fit between an individual’s resources and demands. Stress is a normal occurrence that often arises when you perceive a situation as threatening, or when you are dealing with an unusually large number of everyday responsibilities. With the intense demands of home and work life, many people are experiencing intense stress. Stress in one setting can affect stress levels in the other.

What are the causes of work stress?
There are three sets of factors that are responsible for causing stress.

Environmental Factors:
Environmental uncertainty influences stress levels of employees in an organization. Changes in the business cycle create economic uncertainties. When the economy is contracting, people become increasingly anxious about their security. Political uncertainties are also a cause of stress.

Technological uncertainty is also a type of environmental factor that can cause stress. New innovations can make an employee’s skills and experience obsolete in a very short period of time.

Organizational Factors:
There are no shortage of factors in organizations that can cause stress. These are typical causes of stress at work :
• Bullying or harassment, by anyone, not necessarily a person’s manager
• feeling powerless and uninvolved in determining one’s own responsibilities
• Continuous unreasonable performance demands
• Lack of effective communication and conflict resolution
• Lack of job security
• Long working hours
• Excessive time away from home and family
• Office politics and conflict among staff
• A feeling that one’s reward is not commensurate with one’s responsibility.

Individual Factors:
A person susceptibility to stress can be affected by any or all of these factors, which means that everyone has a different tolerance to stressors. And in respect of certain of these factors, stress susceptibility is not fixed, so each person’s stress tolerance level changes over time:
• Childhood experience (abuse can increase stress susceptibility)
• Personality (certain personalities are more stress-prone than others)
• Genetics (particularly inherited relaxation response, connected with serotonin levels, the brains ‘well-being, chemical’)
• Immunity abnormality (as might cause certain diseases such as arthritis and eczema, which weaken stress resilience)
• Lifestyle (principally poor diet and lack of exercise)
• Duration and intensity of stressors