Work Place Stress and Employee Performance-An Empirical Study

Stress has become part of everybody's life in the globally competitive world. The present day organisations' culture in the age of globalisation, are paying lip service to stress reduction, but increasing intense pressure on individuals to increase productivity. Stress can be brought about by pressure at home and at work. The stress at the work place results due to mismatch between the demands and pressure on the person, on the one hand, and their knowledge and abilities, on the other. It challenges their capability to cope up with the work. This includes not only situations where the pressures of work exceed the worker's ability to cope but also where the worker's knowledge and abilities are not sufficiently utilised and that is a problem for them. The considerable amount of stress would lead to increase the performance but when the stress level increases, it leads to decrease in the performance. There will be number of factors contributing to stress. The organisation needs to assess the adversely impacting factors and develop the mechanism to deal with work place stress. The employers have to treat stress as a serious issue and have concern towards the employees to overcome the stress. Employers cannot usually protect workers from stress arising outside of work, but they can protect them from stress that arises through work in the organisation. Stress at work can be real problem to the organisation as well as for its workers. This paper identifies the contributing factors of stress at the work place, effect of stress on performance and strategies to overcome the stress at the work place to improve the performance.