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Stressors amidst Teaching Community and Strategies for Management of Stress
Author(s) : Dr. Sreeja Sukumar K & Aleena GeorgeVolume & Issue : VOLUME 8 / 2020 , ISSUE 1
Page(s) : 7-18
Abstract
The workload of teachers has undergone drastic change with a whole lot of documentation work related with their class teaching and also related with the internal quality assurance reporting forced upon the teacher. Lack of time and energy and the increased pressure for finishing the workload for a prolonged time period have caused stress to set into their lives. The productivity of the work force is the most decisive factor as far as the success of an organization is concerned and productivity in turn is dependent on the psychosocial well-being of its employees. Stress may arise either due to organizational factors or job-related factors or due to personal factors which accentuate one’s external stressors, in all cases, these stressors decrease general job satisfaction and mental and physical well-being of the employees. Therefore, it is important to identify stress builders inside an organization, study their causes and take concerted efforts to eradicate them. This study aims to identify the reasons for stress among college teachers and provides a comprehensive assessment of the levels of stress and describes the various coping strategies to reduce the stress among teachers in various educational institutions. The study is based on primary data which has been collected with the help of structured questionnaire containing a set of questionsabout the respondent’s profile including the nature of the educational institution, gender, years of service etc and three set of constructs to assess the level of stress caused by organizational factors, job related factors and personal factors. These statements elicited the responses from 109 teachers from different aided, government and selffinancing colleges in Kerala on to a 5-point likert type scale ranging from 1 strongly disagree to 5 strongly agree to he existence of a particular stimulant which increases the stress of the respondent being observed. Reliability test were performed on the 3 constructs which exhibited a Cronbach alpha of above .8 for organizational and jobrelated stressors and 0.6 for personal stressors. The collected data were analyzed by using appropriate statistical and mathematical tools, using SPSS 16.1. Percentages and independent sample T – test, ANOVA, Friedman’s test. The summated mean of the statements collecting opinion on various stress boosters is computed and so, making it statistically correct to perform one way ANOVA on the 3 stressors. The coping strategies were collected using ordinal scale showing the frequency of using a particular strategy ranging from Always to never. Friedman’s test was performed to identify the most frequently adopted strategy to eliminate or reduce stress levels. The study found that stress caused by organizational climate and job-related factors were moderate and that stress due to personal factors were lower than moderate level. Also, the levels of various types of stress across gender, experience, different types of educational institutions, period of total service, age etc were found to be the sameexcept the Post hoc test Tukey revealed that significant difference existed in the level of stress between respondent’s having 20 years and above experience and respondents having years of service between 5 to 10 years.
Keywords
Stress, Teacher, stress management, coping strategies,
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