The Importance Of Work-Related Stress In The Workplace

INTRODUCTION

Fast pace of globalization, technological advancements, multicultural work environment, recessions and subsequent changes in the nature of work have increased stress with everyone at the workplace irrespective of economic status, age and gender (1). Prevalence of distress and its somatic and emotional indicators among corporate personnel are highly responsible for deterioration of their health and performance. Meeting and beating deadlines, unnatural life style, materialistic relationships, no time for self, over indulgence, odd and long work hours, multi-tasking, bullying, poor pay scale, job insecurity, intermixing of work cultures, work-life conflict, role mismatch, role conflict, role overlapping and role overload are some

American Psychological Association (APA) (3) has reported that 69 percent of the employees perceive their job as the source of stress and 51 percent employees are less productive at work because of the stress. The American Institute of Stress (AIS) (4) states that stress related illness costs economy more than $ 100 billion per year and as estimated in 2001 stress costs organizations $ 300 billion in healthcare, workers compensation, absenteeism and turnover; and annual productivity losses hover around $17 billion. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) (5) estimates that the costs to society of work-related stress to be around £4 billion each year, while 13.5 million working days were lost to stress in 2007/08 and hence taking action to reduce the problem can help create a more productive, healthy workforce, staff retention, sickness absence reduction and

In the following hypotheses, the terms practitioners and controls stand for the participants of yoga group and associated control group/waitlist group respectively. Moreover, research hypotheses tested in their null from were: H1: IYI reduces PD of male practitioners compared to their controls; H2: IYI reduces ED of male practitioners compared to their controls; H3: IYI reduces TD of male practitioners compared to their controls; H4: IYI reduces PD of female practitioners compared to their controls; H5: IYI reduces ED of female practitioners compared to their controls; H6: IYI reduces TD of female practitioners compared to their controls; H7: There is relationship between post PD and ED of male practitioners; and H8: There is relationship between post PD and ED of female