Managing Occupational Stress : A Mantra for Success

Stress is the spice of life and the absence of some degree of stress makes life dull, monotonous and spiritless. The life of employees have turn out to be antagonistic due to occupational pressures, tight scheduling that never seems to end on time, unsupportive colleagues, critical bosses , incompetent subordinates and other irritating factors may all have a cumulative effect in making the day to day life quite disconsolate. Stress may be considered as a situation of tension experienced by individual facing extra ordinary demands. In the light of this background, this paper discusses the concept of stress, stages of stress and remedies to make the human resources more and more conducive to enhance their performance to help accomplish their individual as well as organizational goals. It is found that major reasons for stresses are role conflict, role ambiguity, over load and under load, internal relationship, ineffective communication, sharing of responsibilities and job changes climate within the company. Excessive stress harms the individual performance and experience illness, absenteeism, turnover, errors, accidents, dissatisfaction and reduced performance. An optimum level of stress is needed to spur employees to peak performance. This paper observes that various soft skills can be adopted in the organizations to manage stress, and boost work performance. It advocates certain positive measures which if adopted can facilitate employees perform well and contribute professionally towards the growth and success of the organization