Essay: Main cause of work-related stress and the real effects

Work life balance is the way in which an individual should be able to balance between working life and personal life. A healthy work life balance means having the ability to reach an achievement at work in addition to enjoying your personal life, free of stress and work conflicts. To begin with, work-related stress has been a growing issue in most working environments worldwide, which should be discussed and solved in order to reach an efficient and effective business performance. This essay will outline the main cause of work-related stress and the real effects, not only on the employees work performance and productivity, but also on their physical and mental health. The first three paragraphs address the causes of work-related stress where the first paragraph will be explaining the factors due to the work or job itself, the second paragraph  will discuss the causes of stress from the organization’s environment and policies, the third paragraph will address the personal issues some relating to the work, then comes the effects of stress on the employees some of which I will be discussing in the fourth paragraph, and finally in the last paragraph I will be explaining the responsibility of the both parties towards this stress. Despite the employees having some responsibility towards obtaining a healthy work-life balance, Employers mainly are those who should be held accountable over employees work-related stress, as they have the power over controlling and minimizing it.
There are various factors from the work or job that lead to work-related stress. Two main factors which were identified by many researchers (Johnson, Michie and rao) are role ambiguity, which means having unclear identification and understanding of job role or task, and the second factor is time pressure, which may include: short work completion period and being forced to complete work within a deadline without being provided by any given reason, this may put the employee under a lot of pressure, thus high stress level. As it was concluded by research that was carried out in the form of questionnaire in 2017 throughout different places in Malaysia, that these two factors may have a massive contribution in the stress caused in the workplace to the employees (Bala Murali, Basit and Hassan, 2017). Moreover, long working hours also have negative effect on the employee’s stress level. According to a 5year study that was published on medical news today, an individual who works more than the average working hours per week (55 hours) has higher chance by 66% of getting a depression and 74% of having anxiety (Sandoiu, 2016). Other factors include having high expectations at work, setting unrealistic goals, having demanding management and inefficient management of time, moreover some workers may take extra work in order to compete with other colleagues and that can put more pressure and stress on the employees (Rao 2016).  Furthermore, some more factors mentioned include poor working conditions, work overload and lack of job security, over/under promotion, autocratic leadership style where employees are mostly treated as assets of the company and do not take part in the decision-making process which may cause demotivation and inaccessible job diversity (Johnson 2005). Work-related stress can arise due to factors directly related to the workplace as mentioned above, the employer or the business should closely study these factors and try to improve or find solutions to them in order to influence the workers and help them reach a healthy work-life balance.
Furthermore, organizational issues are other factors in which stress could arise from other than from the job and those may lead to poor work-life balance. To begin with, organizational stress may arise due to a change in the organization such as the business deciding to merge with another business, or the business deciding to downsize and that means that it may want to reduce the number of its workers, or even introducing new technology. In addition to factors such as wrong policies of companies which means rules of the company that may be unfair to employees, sudden dismissal or redundancy without any warnings in advance and this may put the employee at a very high stress level. Not to mention some attitudes in the work place from other colleagues or even from the management such as bad relationship with the supervisors and colleagues, bullying and violence (Rao, 2016). Problems with the quality work itself such as: lack of job enrichment and having different complicated tasks or even small amount of work could also have a contribution in the stress level, lack of job security is also another factor (walonick, 1993). In conclusion, those factors directly relate to the organization which could be altered by the business/employer.
Moreover, when personal issues cause stress to someone this is defined as personal stress, and these may include factors related to the personality or private issues as well as career relation, for example financial problems, thus the employee may be forced to take on extra work shifts in order to gain more money , or even someone’s wrong choice of career , meaning that the position or field he’s working in is not something he enjoys or is interested in which is a very crucial thing to be taken into consideration when it comes to choosing your career pathway, or  lack of job security, those all lead to stressful life(walonick, 1993). In contrast, private issues may include having Health problems, issues with the family or even being divorced causes high stress level (Rao, 2016). According to a research done and published on The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health, employees confirmed that life/personal issues causes stress at work (Bhui, Dinos, Galant-Miecznikowska, de Jongh and Stansfeld, 2016). Even though some of these factors may not relate directly to the workplace, they have an indirect relation with the job which remains partly the employer’s responsibility