Occupational Stress: A Study of the Private Banks in Batticaloa District

Abstract

Employees in many countries increasingly complain about high and rising levels of stress at work. As stress levels have increased, employers have faced rising medical bills, more accident insurance claims, increased absenteeism, and declining morale. Most corporate efforts to handle the problem have focused on the symptoms of stress, with, for example, therapy, counseling, gym memberships, and in-house exercise facilities. This research studies the occupational stress of private bank employees in the Batticaloa District. The data for this study is collected from 100 employees selected from banks. In this study we are concerning about two variables, namely Work Demands and Decision Latitude. Work demands are the psychological stressors the job places on the worker and include: the volume of work, the speed of work, the lack of time, and the conflicts involved in having to do different types of work at the same time. Decision latitude encompasses decision authority, which refers to the worker?s authority to make decisions involving how the work is done, and skill discretion, which refers to his or her opportunity to use a variety of skills on the job. The researchers used the questionnaire to collect the primary data. Descriptive and inferential statistics was used to analyze the data, Mean and standard deviation was used in the descriptive statistics to find out the influence of each factor in the dependent variable, stress. And the correlation and regression was done to find out the relationship between independent and dependent variable. The researchers used SPSS 14.0 to analyze the data. In general, we found that stress increases when work demand is high. And the stress reduces when the decision latitude are high. As a result, we suggest the managers to decrease the work demand and increase the decision latitude to keep the stress in a balance level.