organisational stress - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

popularly used in the acventeenth century to mean hardship.strain, adversity or affbction. It was used in the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries to denote force, pressure, strain or strongeffort with reference to an object or person. In engineering andphysics, the term implies an external force or pressure exened onsomething with the intention to distort and being rcsuted by theperson or object on wh~ch it 1s exened.The earl~est and most ~mphenttal conceptual~zat~on of stresscame from Seyle (19561 He obsented an ~dentlcal senes of b~ochemlcal changes in a number of organisms adapt~ng to a vartetyof environmental cond~t~ons He termed rh~senes of changes ofthr 'General Adaptat~on Syndrome (GAS)Khan at al (196.1) vle\v stress as an envtronmentaicharactenst~c thought that affect people adversely.LAZARUS. (1966) made tremendous contribut~on to thestudy of Psycholopcal stress he suggests a more comprehensivedefin~tlon of stress as a gencnc term as a whole area of problemsthat Include the stimuli producing stress reactions. The reactions