CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
The global competition witnessed in business world today, as well as the international cooperation and coordination with the responsive innovative changes taking place in every passing moment had caused complex stress in the work environment. The impact of these rapid changes on the employees and their performance is sometimes favorable and sometimes not. As the technological changes pave the speed of work done by the organizations, the lack of transparency gets least to the limit due to the ill tactics and strategies used that result in a number of organizational problems such as higher turnover rate of employees, the role conflict, the comparatively lower promotion opportunities, and the work overload as well, (Budhwar, 2001).
Stress is a condition which happens when one realizes the pressure on them or requirements of situation are wider than they can handle, and if these requirements are huge and continue for a long period of time without any interval, mental, physical or behavioral problems may occur. Job stress is one of the most important workplace health risks for employees in developed and developing countries (Paul, 2002; Danna and Griffin, 2002). Stressors concern interpersonal relationships at work, such as conflicts with the behavior of supervisors, conflicts with colleagues, conflicts with subordinates and conflicts with management policies (Paul, 2002). Job satisfaction has been the most frequently investigated variable in organizational behavior (Spector, 1997).
Apparently,organizations new practices and programs usually encounters the employees in to a stressful state. The potential for maintaining a substantial amount of resistance at every step by our employees is not simple. To survive and dominate in competitive world today, the employees, especially banking sector employees, must be assigned a proper and balanced job to be accomplished that should be free from job stress (Budhwar, 2001).
In other words, stress at work is a phenomenon of modern life styles. The nature of work has gone through drastic changes over the last few decades and it is still changing at a rapid speed. It has become a universal element and persons from nearly every walk of life have to face stress and almost all profession, starting from an artist to a surgeon, or a commercial pilot to bankers, to sales executives and obviously stress leads toward leaving the job. Stress exists in every organization either big or small. The work places and organizations have become so much complex due to stress has significant effects onemployee’s job performance and the organizations are trying to cope with this scenario (Anderson, 2003).
Agulanna (2007) states that stress is inextricably interwoven with life and it ceases as soon as life itself stops. All living thing: – man, plants and animals are in a constant state of dynamic interaction with their environments. Within the interactions, man tries to modify his environment while his environment actually modifies him and in the process, man experiences a kind of tension or stress. He also adds that as the physical, psychological and behavioural reactions experienced by individuals in situations where they feel that their ability to cope may soon be overwhelmed most psychologists define stress as the physiological and psychological response to a condition that threatens or challenges a person and requires some form of adaptation or adjustment. Stress is the non-specific response of the body to any demand made on it. It is a physiological reaction to either internal cognitive stimuli or external environmental stimuli (Omeje and Agu, 2011).