1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.0 Overview Over ... - DSpace@UM

Balancing work and employee well-being has become important to both in the Privateand Public sectors. Thus, it is important to help individuals, organizations and socialworkers to better understand the stressor and the strains, to formulate appropriate copingstrategies to minimize the negative consequences of job stress. The focus here is onwork-related stress as opposed to life stress or stress in any non-work domain butnevertheless, this chapter will further enlighten a little on the stress and related issues.1.1.1 Occupational stressA great pioneer on medicine and a noted authority on stress, Han Selye once said,“Complete freedom from stress is death” (Brief, Schuler, & Van Sell, 1981). Thus, stressin absolutely inevitable. In the same work, Selye stated that because stress may beassociated with pleasant or unpleasant experiences, it should be viewed as an inevitablehuman condition which, if mismanaged, can result in distress. The study of stressattracted many researches from many fields, particularly those in the psychologicalmedicine and behavioral sciences. The question is, what is stress? Well, stress is anyexperience that creates physiological & psychological imbalances within the individual(Flippo, 1984). Even tough stress has been widely talked about; it is not well understoodand we have yet to develop an effective mechanism for avoiding the distresses of stress.Occupational stress is a fascinating topic in many ways. It has, in the last three decades,become a key concept for academic research into peoples’ physiological andpsychological health problems (Cooper, Dewe & O'Driscoll, 2001). The term job stress,2