Workplace Wellness-Achieving Health & Happiness While Maintaining Productivity

The Determinants of Occupational Stress within the Public Sector

Chapter I

Focus and Framing

Introduction

This section describes the background of the problem , the significance of the

study , the research questions , objectives and the research design of the dissertation

Background of the Problem

Workplace stress has been recently accounted as one of the major source of

various sicknesses and diseases and has been viewed as one of the major determining factor of a company 's profitability

Within the United States , it is estimated that 54 of the

sicknesses that people acquire are stress related (Elkin and Rosch , 1990 as cited from Komper and Cooper , 1999 ,

.1 . In most developed countries , the the gross national product that came about due to absences due to sickness , labor turnover and premature retirement due to poor health rising cost of insurance and other expenditures that came abut due to stress (Wartwright and Cooper , 1997 Cooper et al , 1996 Karasek and Theorell , 1990 as cited from Komper and Cooper , 1999 ,

.1 . Although there are numerous studies that have been conducted in identifying the sources of workplace stress , and its relation to poor health of employees and negative effects within the organization , there are still very few interventions that were created in to improve a particular organization 's working environment . Studies reveal that most of the companies which are aware of the stress within the workplace only focus on secondary or tertiary prevention which include helping employees who have already been showing signs of stress or by giving them prevention treatment activities when seen to have very serious stress-related health problems . Very few of these organizations lean toward primary prevention such as eliminating , reducing or altering stressors at work . As such , it is with this respect that the rate of work-related stress has been steadily increasing

It could be pointed out as well that most of the interventions that are being done in to combat stress focus primarily on the person rather than at the company itself . As such , the "worker oriented approach " which consists of helping employees manage , resist or reduce stress is always the one which is being implemented rather than looking on other factors that could have caused stress (Ivancevich and Matteson 1987 McLeroy et al , 1988 Murphy , 1996 as cited from from Komper and Cooper , 1999 ,

.2 . It could also be significantly noted that Kahn and Byosiere (1992 as cited from from Komper and Cooper , 1999 ,

.2 ) argued that the existence of the programs within the organization often times remain subjective in terms of conducting stress inhibitions . Almost no organization seriously considers their policy structure as the ones which intensify objective stressors within the organization . The lack of a systematic risk assessment or stress audit within organizations that includes identifying factors and risk groups as well as the lack of serious researches that tackles the effects of stress within the workplace has further added on the fostering of work-related stress and the increase of sicknesses and...