Occupational Stress: Measuring its Impact on Employee Performance and Turnover

Abstract

Stress is an emotional strain resulting from adverse circumstances, and currently stress seems to be the numinous sound that affects the performance of employee in the workplace.  Stress is not new in the physiological concepts, but it growing so fast that makes imperative for organizations and employees to accept this instinctive indicator.  Higher level of stress existed with no managerial concern for solution consequently lowering the employee performance, staking organizational reputation and loss of skilled employees.  These situations call for immediate concern that organizations can reduce the occupational stress levels of their employees by designing an effective stress management practices according to their expectations.  In that way, employees can feel that they are the most important assets of the organizations.  The purpose of study is to investigate the relevance of different factors of occupational stress such as workload, interpersonal relationships, conflict, and career development to overall employee performance.  It also examines the impact of stress to the job satisfaction and turnover levels of employee based on reviewed literatures.  Studies revealed that those stressors increases tremendously to employee performance, but voluminous empirical studies also found reverse.  This paper will provide a valuable understandings and awareness that can contribute to develop policies for increasing employee performance and mitigating turnover rate.

Keywords: performance, occupational stress, turnover