PROJECT TITLE :

“Impact of stress on workers

performance’’

SHREE KHAN
MMS193050
SABA KHAN
MMS193051
 ABSTRACT
 Purpose of this study is to analyses the impact of job stress on employee
performance.
 For this purpose employees from various sectors were chosen. A questionnaire
with 26 items with Likert Scale (1: Strongly Disagree to 5: Strongly Disagree)
were developed
 310 respondents were selected from various sectors in Malaysia using
convenient sampling technique. The survey questionnaire was sent via Facebook
inbox requesting to complete it.
 The questionnaire includes demographic information’s and statements to
measure four (4) independent variables of time pressure, workload, lack of
motivation, and role ambiguity to measure level of stress. The dependent
variable is employee performance.
 Only 136 completed questionnaires were returned. Regression analysis was
carried out to examine the impact of stress on employee performance using
SPSS21.
 We found that time pressure and role ambiguity have significant and negative
influence on employee performance. The other two factors of workload and lack
of motivation do not have any significant influence on employee performance.
 Therefore it is important for managers to ensure role ambiguity is
minimized and clear roles are given and communicated to the employees if
they wish to enhance employee performance.
 Also managers and supervisors are strongly recommended to discuss the
time allotment and task completion dates and duration of the task with their
subordinates to avoid time pressure. This would possibly enhance
employee performance.
 Keywords: time pressure, workload , lack of motivation, role ambiguity
 KEYWORDS
 Role ambiguity;  is a term used to describe the lack of clarity, certainty
and or predictability one might have expected with regards to behavior in a
job .
 Workload; the amount of work to be done by someone or something.
 Time pressure; is a type of psychological stress that occurs when a person
has less time available than is necessary to complete a task or obtain a
result. 
 lack of motivation; is a symptom of depression, but it may be caused by
something else.
 Introduction
 Purpose of this research is to analyze the impact of job stress on employee
performance. Numerous studies and research has been done on this subject in
the last few years.
 Job stress has become one of the most popular ‘occupational diseases’ of the
century to mankind and it has affected individuals’ physically and
psychologically, causing such impactful pressure on employees’ performance
 Stress in very general terms as “anything about an organizational role that
produces adverse consequences for the individual”
 Hans Seyle (1956) cited in Sengupta (2007), one of the founding fathers of
stress research, first introduced the term “stress” to describe physical and
psychological responses to severe conditions
 He further stated that stress is not necessarily something bad; it depends on
how you take it. The stress of exhilarating, creative, successful work is
beneficial while that of failure, humiliation or infection
 Based on Euro found report (2013), role ambiguity, organizational change,
job demands, bullying and violence are some of the common stress factors
happening in the workplace today.
 Contextual Gap
Many researches on job stress in association with
 job satisfaction
 job commitment
 productivity and commitment
 employee retention
 job Performance in Malaysian education sector
 work life balance
 work - family conflict were carried out in the past.

Therefore it seems that there is no study done on commercial sectors of Malaysia

by examining job related stress and its impact on employee performance.
PROBLEM STATEMENT

 Stress in the work place plays a significant role in the decline of a productive
work environment.
 Job stress can influence employee both personally and professionally.
 A stressful working environment is unproductive, uncomfortable and
ineffective for the employees and organization as a whole .
 Job stress also negatively affect the quality of work as well.
 prove to be costly for organizations as it may become the cause of increased
employee turnover
 The factor of stress becomes increasingly important in organizations because
it have impact on employee performance which ultimately decreases the
organization productivity and growth.
 Past researches show that there is a general agreement in the organization
addressing the issue of stress and making efforts to reduce stress is not only a
noble goal, but this can also result in reduction in expenses for employers. It
is because of this reason it is imperative to conduct research in the
organization to explore the types of factors that create stress for employee.
 RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

The aim of this research is to

 examine the impact of job stress on employee performance,

 to explore factors that can cause job stress and
 to eliminate factors that create stress for employee’s

Therefore the following objectives were set:

◦ To find out the relationship between stress and job performance

◦ To find out the factors which positively and negatively influence the employee’s
performance
◦ To study and examine the effect of time pressure towards employee performance
◦ To study and examine the effect of workload towards employee performance
◦ To study and examine the effect of lack of motivation towards employee
performance
◦ To study and examine the effect of role ambiguity towards employee
performance
RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This research will try to find answers to the following questions:

 What are the factors that create job stress for employees?
 How job stress can affect the performance of employees?
 What are the relationships between worker stress and job
performance?
Research Hypotheses
Hypotheses that this study aims to prove are as follows:

 H1: Time pressure has a negative and significant influence on

employee performance.
 H2: Workload has a negative and significant influence on
employee performance.
 H3: Lack of Motivation has a negative and significant effect on
employee performance.
 H4: Role ambiguity has a negative and significant influence on
employee performance.
 Significance of Research
 This research is beneficial both
1. academically and
2. the perspective of practical implications

 Academically, this study can contribute its part by adding to the availability
of literature. This study would fill the gap in literature about the job stress and
the different factors creating the job stress.

 This study is also significant from the aspect of practical implications as it

would provide hint to the managers as to what are the factors that may
cause stress to employees

 This study would also provide ideas to managers about the factors that can
cause stress to their employee’s .
 Understanding about the impact of job stress factors would help managers
and supervisors to better deal with their employees and to derive maximum
performance from them.
 LITERATURE REVIEW
 The attention theory of stress suggests that there should be a positive association
between felt job stress and job performance.
 Individuals devote increasing attention to symptoms of stress such as fatigue,
they may become less able to give the focused attention to the task at hand that,
attention theory suggests, will drive performance.
 The logic of the attention approach implies not just limits to the stress-
performance relationship, but possible moderators of that relationship.
 Attention theory distinguishes between job or task attributes that are to be
responded to and attributes that are to be ignored. Individuals who feel stress
deploy their attention differentially, so that performance on attributes of the
dimensions requiring a response may increase even as responses to ignorable
dimensions diminish sharply (Matthews & Margetts, 1991).
 The attention approach is particularly salient when an assigned task has a high
priority for an individual and when the task is familiar to the individual
(Easterbrook, 1959; Matthews & Margetts, 1991). Thus, in an organizational
setting, organizational commitment and job experience are likely to moderate the
stress-performance relationship. Commitment and experience (which breeds task
familiarity) each should lead individuals to focus more heavily on job
performance under stress.
RESEARCH MODEL
Time pressure
(stressor)

Workload
(stressor)

Employee
performance
Lack of
motivation
(stressor)

Role ambiguity
(stressor)
 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY

 The chosen research design to examine the causal impact of stress on

employee performance is explanatory or causal research design.
 This research design is chosen for many reasons.

 First explanatory research focus on causal impact of stress

(independent variable) on employee performance (dependent
variable) .
 Second explanatory research emphasis on empirical study as this
study is about empirical evidence of connecting two variable using
statistical analyses.
 The sample and sampling procedure
 Targeted working professionals mostly office based from various industries and
business sectors
 Total of 310 questionnaires were distributed among the local and expatriates
employees’ who are currently engage in full time and contractual basis.
 Respondents were aged between 20 to 60 ( with 30 years of experience in the
field) were included in this survey.
 This sampling method is simple to accomplish and easy to explain to others,
most cost effective and non-time consuming.
Research Instrument:
 A questionnaire with Likert Scale of 1-5 was developed using past literature.
The construct has twenty six (26) items measuring the following questions to
collect views of respondents on;
 Employee performance (dependent variable) Workload (independent variable)
Time Pressure (independent variable) Lack of Motivation (independent
variable) Role ambiguity (independent variable)
Result
Hypotheses Acceptance and Rejection

 H1: Influence of Time Pressure towards

Employee Performance ( Accepted )
 H2: Influence of Workload towards
Employee Performance (Rejected)
 H3: Influence of Lack of Motivation
towards Employee Performance (Rejected)
 H4: Influence of Role Ambiguity towards
Employee Performance (Accepted)
 Discussion and conclusions
The study have derived the following conclusions from the findings.
1. That time pressure and role ambiguity has a significant adverse
influence on employee performance. (described that when the employees’
receive too many tasks or job assignments and is expected to have it
completed within the limited given timeline)the rate of turnover seemed to
end-up quite high.
2. The second most influenced factor or variable is role ambiguity. The
unclear of their roles and position in their organization does impact their
job performance. (Based on the survey results, about (45%) of the
respondents are still unclear of their job description or role in their current
organization). That’s Why 2.5 million Americans would quit their jobs on
a monthly basis and close to 30 million in a year,
3. Workload might not adversely impact employee performance.
4. Lack of motivation also proved that there is no significant influence in
employee performance. Perhaps, it is essential to note that these days,
motivational talks do not work much on employees. In this survey, many
are gained for financial rewards, as it would motivate them highly,
 Limitations

The limitation experienced through this research is that

 The sample size of the survey was rather medium compared to other
past studies conducted.
 Moreover, the questionnaire created could be more profound.
 The time to receive some of the feedbacks of the survey was long and
that did disrupt the motivation of wanting to achieve a better sample
size.
Future research

 Since the research was done within working professionals in Malaysia

emphasizing few industries,
 Perhaps in future the research could be well structured, researching on one
particular key industries (e.g. oil and gas or banking) that has massive
expectations on employee performance, would be recommended.
 Future studies could explore other independent variables that affect employee
performance.
 Other researchers should identify and explore other variables that were not
utilized to be considered for this research.
 The sample size could have increased to more rather than 136.
 It is also recommended that future researchers could further explore this
research on a wider data and discover other variables that effects employee
performance that would enable to provide a better analytical results.