Most employees have to cope with role expectation that are conflicting, incompatible and not clearly defined. Either that or they have too many roles to perform or not challenging enough. This role playing has direct impact on employees, and almost always resulted in stress.
Stress is a word that often being used but difficult to define. It is usually best described through its symptoms. Basically there are three categories of stress symptoms:
- psychological - refers to emotional feelings like the dislike of coming to work, depression, anxiety, frustration and resentment
- physical - includes headache and cardio-vascular disease
- behavioural - refers to avoidance of work, over-reaction, under-reaction and aggression
Examples of work roles that causes stress:
- required to perform one or more roles that are in conflict with each other; e.g. the compliance of one expectations and demands of role A will make compliance of expectations and demands of role B more difficult
- receiving contradictory or incompatible demands from one or more superiors
- lack of clarity or predictability about the expectation associated with a given role
- performing a collection of roles that do not fit precisely
- the feeling that their skills are under-utilised
These stresses can be minimised or eliminated by:
- pay particular attention to the matching abilities, motivations and personalities
- allocating and restructuring work tasks and responsibilities
- communicate the core requirements of the job
- foster clear understanding of the job responsibility and duty
- convey clear specifications of the prescribed role expectations
SHARED FROM ARTICLE BY:
YIP WAH KONG
WORK ROLE AND STRESS
ACCOUNTANTS TODAY, MAY 2005
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