Direct Relationship between Stress and Employee Performance - Essay Example

Key words: Stress, performance, employee.

Stress is a feeling of physical tension that makes one feel frustrated, nervous, or angry, whereas employee performance is the way workers can thoroughly do their duties as they are required. Many things can lead to Stress in work. Similarly, there are many outcomes of Stress.

In a research carried out by Mark and Smith, there were antecedents of Stress which included participation hypothesized to have a direct negative association with job tension, conflict of duties and ambiguity role (Lewin 1951). Similarly, there were positive effects that touched on satisfaction and organization commitments.

Still, research has proved to have both negative and positive results according to the many researches done by different people. There is need to get a better understanding of how stress affect people and also the remedies of stress. On the remedies it is good to know how employees can avoid stress and focus more on their productivity. To do this, there are a number of stress models that answer these stress questions. These models are, the personal environment fit model, effort demand model, job control model and also the caregiving stress models. Below is an illustration of the four models and how they affect the employees at work.

The personal Environment fit model states that personal characteristics interacts with the place of work to determine whether someone is straining and also the health status. Similarly, the match between a person and their work environment is the key influencing their health (French 1973). It is therefore necessary that the employees should have a healthy attitude, skills, abilities and resources that match their job demands (Lewin 1951). When some of the things above domains can cause problems, and the greater the misfit between the employee and their working environment, the greater the strain as the requirements exceed the deliverables and also the requirement exceeds the returns of the employee. Still on the persona environment, there are defense mechanisms that try to reduce misfit. These mechanisms include denial, reappraisal and coping. This is a clear illustration that if you don match your working area, there is a possibility of no delivering well.

Besides, according to research, effort reward model specifies the performance of all other models for several systems, but no model has proven itself applicable overall systems classes and sizes (Veldhoven 2005). The effort reward model, has some key features because it places emphasis on the subjective perceptions of the environment, however, the individual role and differences and explication of internal processes is less developed than in other transactional models (Lazarus 1980) The key concept of the effort reward model is reciprocating where the effort of work should be compensated by suitable rewards and also a mismatch between these will always lead to stressful lives in the work places. These rewards are defined as esteem, money, career opportunities and also security. Effort on the other hand has two components which are intrinsic effort and excessive effort. Intrinsic effort is such as control need and also over commitment while excessive effort is where there are unrealistic goals. External demands are proposed to relate to the status of labor market and how easily an alternative can be found by an employee. This shows that there is need to create realistic goals in order to avoid unnecessary stress in the work place and also get good results.

Lastly, job demand-control support model is the most influential model of stress in the workplace. It focusses on two psychosocial characteristics of job demands and job control. The employee characteristics is sometimes called the decision latitude and is made up by other factors of decision and skill discretion (karaesk 1979). The demand control model can also be called the interaction model because it focuses on the structural features of an individual in relation to their working environment and this is compared to what is occurring in the interaction (kompier 2003). Research proved that those exposed to high levels of demand and had low levels of job control are likely to show high levels of depression, fatigue and also cardiovascular disease and mortality. On the other hand, low levels of diseases were in people with moderate levels of demand if they also have high levels of job control and thus where there is high demands and low control then there is strain. High control buffers the negative effect of demand on outcomes. This is a clear illustration that there is need for high control in people so that they can be able to manage the demands posed to them.

Besides, Stress may have a positive impact on an employee. On this, Mark and Smith had a very sound argument, where they said that caregiving Stress had a positive impact on the employee’s work (Huang, Feurstein and Sauter 2002). To support their point, they gave an example of a nurse, who was always on toes when patients were in critical conditions. The nurse was always stressed looking for solutions, and at the end, she would save the lives of the sickly patients. The boss of the nurse was pleased by the nurse, and due to this, the nurse was promoted in the workplace (Jose 2004). As a sound person, the argument to Mark and Smith that caregiving stress had a positive impact was real.

In any stress, there must be a stressor behind. A stressor is a demand by the environment that is thought to be threatening. In an employee’s work, there are several types of stressor, according to Mark and Smith (Cox 2000). These stressors include challenge stressor and hindrance stressor. According to Mark and Smith, challenge stressor is those that support personal goals while hindrance stressor is those that threaten personal goals (Spector 2003). Mark and Smith also argued that challenge stressor represents the positive side of Stress, while hindrance stressor represents the negative side of Stress.

In conclusion, Stress has proven to have both negative and positive effect concerning the work of an employee as we have seen in the above arguments. It is, therefore, upon those with different kinds of stresses to hand the respectively with their nature. Similarly, there are very many ways that individuals can avoid stress and focus on their productivity.