Factors capable to induce stress in workers in any organization
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Most people feel physically, emotionally and mental imbalance when they are confronted with some problems; and they allow these problems to eat into their system thereby affecting the performance of their work, business and their behaviour. Others when confronted with problems pay no attention to these problems thereby developing a mechanism to cope with these problems.
Wastell and Newman (1996) have argued that a well-designed working system should realize the aim of enhancing human performance and lowering stress. Every individual desires vibrant mental and emotional health that will contribute to achievement, attractive personality and happiness. Our mental and emotional healths today are plagued by stress, which arises mainly from psychological and environmental needs. Some of these are need for food, water or shelter, the need for recognition, social approval, prestige or power and the need for self-esteem, comfort achievement or warm emotional ties. Benjamin and Walz (1997) asserted that as soon as the needs are aroused, attempts to gratify them begin immediately. If the attempts succeed the needs are satisfied, homeostatic is restored and if this will not occurs all the time over a long period the individual will not achieve psychological adjustment and a perpetual feeling of depression (Bakare, 1998). This depression will lead to stress, stress is a necessary and unavoidable concomitant of daily living necessary because without some stress we would be listless and apathetic creatures, and unavoidable because it relates to any external event, be it pleasurable or anxiety producing.
Accordingly Benjamin and Walz (1997) observed that severe stress has been correlated with coronary disease, respiratory problems, backaches, high blood pleasure, and other psychosomatic illnesses, to the extent that for most people stress is a loaded term that connotes unhealthy or harmful conditions i.e. a diseases or illness. However, stress can also motivate and invigorate and enable people to achieve far more that they thought themselves capable of doing.
Teaching and learning in Nigerian secondary school seems to have some psychological but relatively low financial rewards. This result in what Peil (1997) called a circulation deterioration in the social position of teaching and its teachers. Idah (1998) noted that teaching makes school what they are and the quality of education depends on the teachers. It is inevitable that teachers along with the rewarding and satisfying aspects of their teaching job will also encountered a range of stressful experiences. This is so, according to Black and Lamont (1998) teaching is considered to be among the professions in which employees are subjected to high level of stress. Meeting the daily learning and behaviourial needs of students make teaching a stressful job. They observed that although few people would doubt that teaching can be a stressful job, anxiety over frequent school unrest due to cult activities, inspection, slumping and dying during frequent screening exercise and frequent strikes by teachers.
However, not all stress associated with teaching is negative, stress that reduces teachers’ motivation can have deleterious effects such as alienation from the workplace, ill health and absenteeism (Browne, 1997). In the word of Hardy (2007) a modicum of stress in the workplace can provide a stimulus to motivation and help achieve work tasks and objectives. Pitters (1995) had earlier considered sources of stress in teaching job to include but not limited to irregular payment of salaries, insufficient teaching resources, lack of motivation, embarrassment of teachers by parents, poor students attitude to academic work, absenteeism to cheating in examination. Others include teaching in a closely noisy environment, lack of recognition by the public work overload, insecurity in the job among others.
Nigerian teachers need incentives schemes as stipulated by the international labour organization (Ilo, 1991) and founding article 94 to 145 of teacher’s welfare scheme in orven to help them manage and stressful condition. According to Davis and Mckay (1988) job stress management like stress management in general involved finding the right type and amount of challenges to stimulate overloading them. It also required managing inevitable, as well as balancing leisure period and work related activities so that they can compliment one another.
Nwachukwu (2003) in his assertion noted the following stress management methods.
- Avoid stressors through appropriate life adjustment, develop more nurturing relationship, finding a more suitable job, attempting to create a working environment and or style that is more rewarding
- Making the expectations and demands made upon oneself keeping task in perspective maintaining realistic self-expectation.
- Changing stress inducing ways of behaviour and responding, recognizing unproductive behaviour, finding alternative ways of behaving
- Augmenting personal coping resources assessing personal assets, knowing personal strength bringing them to bear on difficult situations.
It could be observed that secondary school teachers irrespective of their ranks and files have been experiencing one form of stress or another in their teaching situation. This paper therefore proposed the following management therapy to cope with teacher’s stressful condition.
- Daily Exercises: This is any type of physical exertion performs in an effort to improve health, shape of bodies, and boost performance.
Wortman et al (1991) asserted that exercise is healthful way to jettison stress and it is negative effects, he noted that people take to walking, joggling, swimming, riding bicycles, playing football or tennis inorder to combat stress. Onoh (2002) rather noted with dismay that teachers failed to take advantage of this proven usefulness of exercise to revive and sustain their interest and get involved in the period of evening game inorder to reduce stress.
- Sleeping Period: This is a period slated for a natural state of bodily rest. Sleeping period is observed throughout the human race including animals. Regular sleeping period is essential for survival of man. The National Sleep Foundation in the United States of America (2007) maintained that eight to nine hours of sleeping period is optimal for an adult as sufficient sleep benefits alertness, memory and problem solving, and overall health, as well as reducing the risk of accidents.
It could be observed among-teachers of secondary school as they are fatigue with school work of preparing daily/weekly notes of lesson, marking of notes, conducting assessment, filling of necessary records in the dossiers and moreoren engaging in marking external examination such as NECO, GCE and SCCE. There seems to be a decline in cognitive performance of teachers as a result of fewer than eight hours of sleeping period could be observed among them (Stanley, 2007).
- Relaxation: This is taking oneself out on a normal day-to-day activities to relax, have fun and activities that makes you feel good, such activities as enumerated by Argule (1989) include: dancing, listening to music, walking along the beach, praying, hiking in the mountains, working in the garden, taking photograph, watching birds, going to watch movies golfing, swimming and visiting museums to mention a few. The researcher noted that teachers found it difficult to make a commitment to practice or do anyone of the following tips as stress level among them would begin to fall to a range where it is manageable or causes no long-term damage to health or relationships.
- Time Management: This is the act of controlling events. The heart of time management is management of oneself. It is more than just managing time. It is the setting priorities and taking charge of ones situation and time utilization.
It could be observed among secondary school teachers that they cannot by any means change these habits or activities that causes them to waste time as could be seen in going to school late, also attending to classes late, Mark the scripts late and sometimes may not complete termly result on time if not couple with query.
As asserted by Macmillan and Keller (2007) teachers engages in wasteful discussion like chatting on the phone, meeting family obligation first and being distracted from focus on important school task. This unchangeable behaviour could be seen in perpetual low academic productivity among teachers.
- Humour: This is a quality of being amusing or comic. It could also be the ability to appreciate thing, situations or people that are comic. Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary expressed humours as the ability to keep someone happy or content by accepting or agreeing to someone wishes, even if they seem unreasonable.
In this research work humour is seen as building relationships, contending with circumstances and expressing sensibility. It may not be out of place to observe that secondary school teachers lack sense of humour to content and accept their fellow staff not to mention their students. Some teachers found it difficult to reason and build up contending relationship. Teachers at most times are stressed up as a result of lack of humour between the principal and staff thereby engineering poor performing output among teachers.
- Medication: This is the prescribing of drugs by medical practitioners to be taken by the patient. Medication are prescribed very widely and indeed many teachers like any other person have such faith that they would be cheated and not well diagnosed and examined if they are not given tablets or course of injection after a visit to the hospital or by a doctor. Stress could be managed by emotional supplement of Vitamins and Ginseng. Vitamins are micronutrients/substances derived from natural and artificial sources required for depression and fine function of the body. Medication is necessary to keep body healthy. It requires specific preparation particularly taken during stress due to loss of appetite. It could be observed that among secondary school teacher lack of adequate health care facilities and knowledge on proper medication, financial constraints as a result of raising a large family could not pay for hospital bills inorder to control stress, rather they patronize quacks and fake drugs dealers as a result they do not maintain the balance of many bodily functions during stress. This inversely will affect their work/teaching performance. However, no managing therapy could be successful for all individual in all situations. Therefore the researcher is of the opinion that whatever therapy would be adopted to manage stress must be sensitive to individual differences, including both cultural and situational differences. This paper will therefore focus on stress management therapy and teaching performance of secondary schools teachers in Uyo senatorial district.
STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM
There are several factors capable to induce stress in workers in any organization. On the part of secondary school teachers, there are many factors that caused stress in the teachers. These factors are called stressors; few include irregular payment of salary, poor remuneration, poor working conditions, low status and conflict within the work place. Others include time pressure, student attitude to academic work, length of teaching experience and workload among teachers.
Stress being described, as hyperactive behaviour has been known to affect productivity on the job. Stress is seen on this study as a threat to fulfillment of basic needs to the functioning of the nervous system including growth and developments. According to Worran and Towl (1995) stress has been found to be a major problem within schoolteachers, which leads to rising absenteeism and moral decadence. Stress level is escalated when a person’s opportunity to satisfy what he or she considers to be the basic of psychological need is interfered with by the societal lack.
These societal lacks induce stressors that have direct imposition on teachers by prevailing social systems creating psychological discomfort and its manifestation resulting in abnormal behaviour.
According to Dunhern (1981) the capacity with which one can adjust to accommodate a prevailing stressful situation therefore depends on the opportunities on has to change his or her personal characteristics.
There appears to be a problem of management of stress by secondary school teachers as no clear defining therapy has been articulated for effective teaching performance. This situation has been of much concern to experts in the field of Guidance and Counseling as to whether the problem of stress is none provision of basic psychological needs to secondary school teachers or unavailability of management therapy.
With the above constraints, there is a probability that it may be increasingly become difficult to obtain effective teaching. If there would be no intervention and therefore perpetual poor teaching performance would be recorded. It is therefore, become imperative to appraise stress management therapy and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
The major purpose of the study is stress management therapy and teaching performance of secondary schools teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
Specifically the study will seek to:
- Find out the relationship between exercise and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo senatorial district.
- Identify the relationship between sleep period and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- Examine the relationship between relaxation period and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- Examine the relationship between time management and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- Identify the relationship between humour sharing and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- Find out the relationship between medication and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
RESEARCH QUESTION
The following research questions were poised to guide the study.
- What are the relationship between exercise and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- What are the relationship between sleep period and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- What are the relationship between relaxation period and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- What are the relationship between time management and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- What are the relationship between humour sharing and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
- What are the relationship between medication and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District.
RESEARCH HYPOTHESES
The following hypotheses were formulated to guide the study:
- There is no significant relationship in the mean responses of male and female teachers between exercise and teaching performance of secondary school teachers.
- There is no significant relationship in the mean responses of male and female teachers between sleep period and teaching performance of secondary school teachers
- There is no significant relationship in the mean responses of male, and female teachers between relaxation period and female teachers between relaxation period and teaching performance of secondary school teachers.
- There is no significant relationship in the mean responses of male and female teachers between humour sharing and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo senatorial district.
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
The findings of the study will be of great importance to teachers, educational administrators, principals of secondary school and counselors.
Teachers will be aware of the existence and impact of stressors on them, as they would be able to appreciate the management therapy inorder to be more productive as teachers.
Educational administrators will be enlightened in deriving policies to reduce sources of stress on teachers thus enabling them to make policies for good performance in teaching profession principals of schools will appreciate the need to improve on their administration skills within the ultimate goal of affective positively the teachers welfare. This would be achieve through change in behaviour and pre-perception to meet the demands of their job, environment and society counselors will stand to gain from the study as it will enable them to isolate the stressors and apply the therapy to reduce impact of stress on them thereby enhancing teacher enthusiasm in teaching.
The outcome of the study is made available to the state and federal ministry of education could assist them in making policies, planning and provision of the relevant conducive working condition for teachers the result of the study would serve as an academic contribution interms of providing reference materials and literature to Guidance and Counselling research at the universities and other educational institution.
DELIMITATION OF THE STUDY
The focus of the study is to examine stress management therapy and teaching performance of secondary school teachers in Uyo Senatorial District. The study therefore is delimited to examining the relationship between stress management therapy and teaching performance among secondary school teachers. Their therapy include-exercise, sleep period relaxation period, time management, humour sharing and medication.
ASSUMPTION OF THE STUDY
The following constitute the assumption underlying the study;
- That what is called stress is measurable and is not perceived in the same way by all teachers under the same condition
- That the teachers would co-operate with the researcher to complete and return the completed questionnaire to enable the study to be completed as schedule
- The awareness of the influence of the management therapy would go along way to reduce stress and enhance adequate teaching performance
DEFINITION OF TERMS
Stress: This is a response of the body to a variety of internal and external stimuli that triggers the fight-or-flight response.
Therapy: A treatment designed to improve a health problem of secondary school teachers and equip them with effective mechanisms for coping or dealing with psychological stress.
Management: The process of dealing with or controlling, teachers for optimum teaching performance
Teaching performance is the sum held of teacher’s activity of ensuring that the goal, aims and objectives of education is achieved.