Stress and Its Impact on Employee Performance

 

Figure 1: Workplace stress (Shutterstock, 2021)

The World Health Organisation explains stress as follows.

Stress can be defined as a state of worry or mental tension caused by a difficult situation. Stress is a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives. Everyone experiences stress to some degree. The way we respond to stress, however, makes a big difference to our overall well-being. (WHO, 2023, p. 1)

WHO (2023) also explains that a little bit of stress is good and helpful but what is important is to learn how to cope with it.

What causes stress at work?

According to the Cambridge dictionary, factors that cause stress are known as stressors. Employees usually feel stressed due to a combination of stressors (Iskamto, 2021). Stressors can be work related and non-work related. Main work-related stressors are identified as role overload, role ambiguity, and role conflicts (Saleem, et al., 2021). Inadequate skills to perform the job, mismatch between efforts made and rewards received, and interpersonal conflicts can contribute to workplace stress as well (Saleem, et al., 2021).

How does stress affect employee performance?

Productivity of an employee depends on his or her ability to focus on the tasks at hand and deliver them on time in full. With stress, in the short term, employees find it difficult to concentrate, meet deadlines, and be creative (Eys, 2021). In the long term, stress can lead to more serious health conditions such as burnout, anxiety, depression, and conflict (Eys, 2021). The long-term issues can lead to absenteeism and turnover as the author has observed. An employee who is often absent and often produces low-quality work is less productive and thus has poor work performance.

Stress can also create a ripple effect in teams. When a single employee is stressed, the subsequent issues risen due to the employee’s condition can create stress for other team members (Eys, 2021). The stress propagates across the teams due to collaboration issues, conflicts, and added workload due to delays, absenteeism, or rework due to low-quality work.

While a single person’s stress can affect his or her own team as a whole, it is logical to conclude that when teams depend on each other, one team’s setback can affect the other dependent teams too. For example, when an engineer in an engineering team is stressed and is causing delays and conflicts within the team, the customer service team who is waiting for the engineering team to complete a certain task to respond to the customer on an issue they have raised is suddenly put on a hot spot. The customer may put pressure on the customer service team who is unable to effectively work with the engineering team creating stress for the customer service team. In this way, the stress of even a single person can create a huge impact on the entire organisation.

As discussed above, it is clear how stress affects employee performance due to a number of issues. It is also evident that the employee performance has a high impact on the organisation’s performance. Therefore, stress at workplace is an important subject to be addressed in modern Human Resource Management (HRM).

References

Eys, P. v., 2021. HR’s Guide to the Effect of Job Stress on Employee Performance. [Online]
Available at: https://www.pathways.com/pathways-at-work/blog/job-stress-and-employee-performance
[Accessed 16 August 2023].

Iskamto, D., 2021. Stress and Its Impact on Employee Performance. International Journal of Social and Management Studies, 2(3), pp. 142-148.

Saleem, F., Malik, M. I. & Qureshi, S. S., 2021. Work Stress Hampering Employee Performance During COVID-19: Is Safety Culture Needed?. Frontiers in Psychology, Volume 12, pp. 1-13.

Shutterstock, 2021. 10 Conditions Linked to Stress. [Art] (Mount Elizabeth Hospitals).

WHO, 2023. Stress. [Online]
Available at: https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/stress
[Accessed 16 August 2023].