Job Stress and Gender

                 

This is job stress as it is perceived by the male and female teachers. Every individual has the dream of actualization and in when things do not go as planned for an individual, the individual is stressed up. War (1987) averred that the aspiration of meeting up with human needs and lack of self-esteem are symptoms of stress, this is because everybody requires some element of respect and honour in his/her working place.

According to Cooper (1985) in his study, he found out that non-manual workers in senior positions in companies are found to be less stressed than other set of workers of intermediate status like messengers, cleaners etc. as a still higher value of stress is experienced by unskilled workers whose jobs are mainly respectively and demand a lot of physical effort.

Schools in Nigeria have been characterized by disrespect for moral values as teachers are treated with ridicule and contempt. Teachers don’t have regard from pupils and the government (Eme, 1996). Stress is delicate in nature and when perceived negatively or becomes of excess, it tends to affect the health and academic performance of the teacher or the individual involved. Campbell and Stevenson (1992) averred that school teachers often attempt to control and reduce their stress through avoidance, religious and social support or positive reappraisal. Teachers in schools are engulfed with so much stress and this can be reduced or controlled through effective time management and study techniques.

        Macan (1990) found that teachers perceived themselves in control of their time reported greater work and life satisfaction and fewer job induced somatic tension, leaving home for school is a development mile stone that can exist psychological difficulties or trigger the emergence of new ones.

        Moreover, leaving home, family and peer support and arriving at an unfamiliar place where high academic standards often creates pressure which can deepen depression of teacher and perception of job stress is limited, said that teachers also being stress into the classroom in the form of inherent personality traits.

        Researchers like Baumrind (1996), Okafor (2002) and Durojaiye (1984) argued that female teachers actually experienced more symptoms of depression and anxiety than the male teachers.

        Life can be stressful especially for teachers that are employed newly and where decision which will determine what they will do with their lives. It is a time where they set the path they have to take to reach their goals. They are faced with many challenges and questions such as selecting a school which may be in their home town or away from home, female and male teachers both experienced a great deal of job stress at this point of their life. However, researches show that female teachers experienced higher level of stress.

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Effects of Stress

The way and manner in which individuals react to job stress differ from one individual to another, as it is consequent on the effect it has on the individual which in turn reflects majorly on the activities of the individual. At this point it is important to note the effects of job stress and in this case it is directed towards teachers in schools.

        Research has shown that the effects of stress could be psychological or physiological. According to a stress manual, some of the common effects of stress include:

i.    Eating Problems and Weight: Often stress is related to weight gain and obesity, many people develop craving for salty, fat and sugar to counter tension and thus gain weight, on the other hand some people suffer a loss of appetite and loss of weight. In rare cases job stress may trigger hyperactivity of the thyroid gland, stimulating appetite, but causing the body to burn up calories faster than normal rate.

ii.  Eating Disorder: Anorexia nervousa and bulimia nervousa are eating disorders that are highly associated with maladjustment problems in response to stress and emotional issues.

iii.Diabetic: Chronic stress has been associated with the development of insulin resistance, a condition in which the body is unable to use stress effectively to regulate glucose (blood sugar), insulin resistance is a primary factor in diabetics, and such can also exacerbate existing diabetes by impairing the patient’s ability to manage the disease effectively.

iv. Sleeping Disturbance: The tension of unresolved stress frequently causes insomnia, generally awakening in the middle of the night and early morning.

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THE CONCEPT OF JOB STRESS

 

Several definitions have been made on the concept of job stress. But all the researchers tend to agree at this point that stress is a stimulus that spore its stressee and determine his or her level of peace or worries within.

        Thy also agree that stressors comes from either within or outside the stressee. On the other hand, it is a deliberating psychological condition brought about by unrelieved work stress, which result in depleted energy reserves lowered dissatisfaction and permission and increased absenteeism and inefficiency at work, stress affects all workers of any field whether skilled or unskilled.

        The effect of stress was also discussed which could be medical, physical or psychological and finally stress as it pertains to male and female teachers in schools was also looked at.

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Causes of Job Stress

Job stress is caused by so many factors or forces and they are called stressors. These stressors tend to threaten the existence and well-being of the individual and the way he/she responds to the threat (Lazarus, 1966). The major sources or causes of job stress is categorized into the physical, psychological and environmental, it could include personal injuries, illness, lack of sleep, other deformities such as blindness, amputation and exhaustion and these tend to put the individual in an incapable state where he/she can do nothing.

        Psychological stress occur from reasons that comparatively trivial or even in the situations that are pleasurable, while environmental stress involves noise from cars, buses, lories and industrial machineries. Cooper and Marshall (1978) identified six causes of job stress. These are factors intrinsic to job, role stress (conflicts) relationship at work, career stress (i.e. job insecurity), under-promotion, organizational structure and climate and interface between work and home. In the same vein Adeoye (1992) explained that the three key factors causing stress are factors intrinsic to the job itself, individual characteristics and loss of control.

        Frustration is also another factor of job stress which is directed towards us by parents, siblings, friends, co-staffs, machine which breakdown just when we need to use it, the interruption when carrying our work which forces us to do something, the score which we are trying to have that is not coming all of these are small frustration. If these numerous frustrations become too numerous and we allow them to affect us well, we will soon be faced with an intolerable level of stress as dangerous as if it has come from one giant stress factor.

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STAGES OF STRESS

 

i.    The Alarm Stage: This is a warning stage, this stage clearly signals the presence of stress agents in the body, and in turn there are physical reactions which tend to be the first to appear. These reactions warns the individual that he has to be on guard as there are stress agents present in the body, and once the individual is aware of these, he or she can take measures to face the problem and solve them. When this is done the effects or aftermath of stress is reduced or not materialized at all. Stress may be from one or multiple sources combined together.

ii.  The Resistance Stage: When stress is not curtailed during the alarming stage, it goes further to enter into the resistance stage. In this stage the individual will start to notice some signs that will slow his/her action down. The individual might suddenly realize that he is losing lot of energy and conduction level of the body becomes lower than usual. At this stage something needs to be done in order for him/her to survive, and he/she does not know that he/she is in a vicious circle, then tries to complete the task ahead but finds out that it is practically impossible and this calls for major concern to him/her as failure is not an option given the task in hand.

iii.The Exhaustion Stage: This stage is the final stage and is characterized by fatigue, accompanied by nervousness, irritability, tension and anger. The individual becomes anxious and not only when he/she is faced by stress factors but also in moments which would not normally produce any anxiety. This further leads to depression and this means lacking pressure in an activity or activities, the individual suffers from dizziness and the thoughts of the individual are pessimistic and negative.

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Concept of Job Stress

 
 Job stress has been of major concern to all and sundry in the educational sector and in the education sector, and as such various authors have in different ways explained the concept of stress according to their own understanding. According to Ecker (1987) job stress is a physical response that the human body involves in other to fuel with a perceived threat to its stability. Everly and Girdqano (1979) are of the view that stress is a fairly predictable arousal of psychological system which if prolonged, can cause fatigue or damage of system to the point of malfunction and disease.

It is both the cause and the result of physiological and psychological process in the interaction with others. In the same way, Denga (1986) mentioned that individuals are susceptible to different pattern of job stress. A situation may be stressful or not depending on individual attitude towards it.

According to Nweze (1995) stress is a feeling and direct consequences of personal life attributes and disposition as they affect the individual reactions to personal life experiences including threats, pleasant and negative ones. Adebanwi (1995) averred that job stress is a condition or situation where an individual finds him or herself under frustration, fear, anger, resulting in tension, anxiety, depression, loss of appetite and in extreme cases loss of sleep at night. In the light of the above, Panker (1977) regarded stress as a reaction which we experience when we cannot cope with a situation. Job stress according to Baron (1986) is an external condition which produces feelings of discomfort, tension, since they are seen as threatening, frustrating or they exceed the individual’s capacity to deal with them.

        Job stress therefore is a state of the mind, if the mind is peaceful there will be no stress but if the mind is troubled then there is too much stress and this can lead to exhaustion and breakdown physically, mentally and emotionally. From the various views of job, stress can be looked at from the medical, psychological and equilibrium destabilization of the individual’s body by external factors and the interaction between a combination of these and other factors. Although the term stress is popularly used by almost everybody in the sphere of human endeavor; its meaning is not generally agreed upon.

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OCCUPATIONAL STRESS FACTORS AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL 2

communication stress

Job stress according to Beehr and Newman (1978) is a condition arising from the interaction of people and their jobs, characterized by changes within the people that force them to deviate from their normal functioning. For our purpose, we take job or occupational stress to refer to the reaction to the demands on the work environment such that the individual is

unable to contend with them. Be that as it may, it needs to be stressed, however that stress is an inevitable phenomenon experienced by everybody in all works of life. Work related stress is of growing concern because it has significant economic implications for organizations through employee-dissatisfaction, lowered productivity, and lowered emotional and physical health of the employee (Matteson and Ivancevich, 1987).

        A search of the literature reveals that researches carried out on principal stress were conducted mostly in the developed countries like the USA (Whitaker, 1996); the U.K (Cooper, 1988) and Australia (Beeson and Matthews, 1992). The applicability of their recommendations may not be tenable in a developing country like Nigeria. In Nigeria, the bulk of research conducted so far had focused exclusively on stress among university administrators (Ugoji, 1995; Bamisaiye, 1996). Little studies had been carried out on stress among principals of secondary schools in Nigeria.

        This background emphasizes the need to explore principal stress in the Nigerian context more so when considered against the crucial position of the school principal in secondary school management. This study was, therefore undertaken to explore the occupational stress factors among secondary school principals in Warri South Local Government Area of Delta State. 

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