Running head: CAUSES OF STRESS 1
Factors Causing Stress
Jose A Cosme Ortiz
Fort Hays State University
Author Note
Written for ENG 101: Educational Leadership Development, taught by Dr. Bryan Corbin
CAUSES OF STRESS 2
Factors Causing Stress
Stress refers to the way an individual’s body responds to various types of demand causes
by either positive or negative experiences. A person experiencing stress undergoes a state of
confusion and conflict between responsibilities, demands, outcomes, and opportunities which
exerts a lot of pressure on one’s mind, thereby causing stress. When an individual fails to meet
desired outcomes, secure opportunities, meet responsibilities and fail to achieve particular
demands, the individual faces pressure from the forces that come with the aforementioned
aspects consequently suffering from stress due to the mismatch. Recently, stress has been a
major concern in society due to the persistent increase in its occurrence. Individuals from all age
brackets, starting from children to older persons are facing various stress-causing factors. This
paper seeks to elucidate on the causes and effects of stress and the objections other persons
possess in regard to the causes and effects of stress.
Work-related factors
Work-related factors occur due to increase workplace demands and forces exerted on by
other stakeholders within the job place. The workplace has so far been a major cause of stress
due to the environmental pressures. According to Jalilian, Shouroki, Azmoon, Rostamabadi and
Choobineh, (2019), stress arises due to the demand and control factors which tend to be the key
determinants to job strain. Proponents of this model suggest two determinants of stress, which
include decisions latitudes and psychological demands. To start with, interpersonal skills and
abilities required in the workplace have a significant impact on psychological demands placed on
an employee. On the other hand, decision latitudes encompass flexibilities of the roles and
responsibilities in the workplace and control in the decision making the process.
CAUSES OF STRESS 3
When that psychological demands and job control are low, the workplace environment
will become passive in the sense that it will have little or no job motivation hence will yield
negative effect of obsolescence of job skills possessed by employees. Additionally, when
psychological demands are high, and control is low, workers face high strain working conditions,
which result in physical illnesses and extremely high conditions. These factors affect workers
workload and performance expectations, which exert pressure on employees, thus facilitating
stress (Goh, Pfeffer, Zenios, and Rajpal, 2015). Other work-related factors include aspects such
as compensation and salary, customer dealing, outcomes of decisions, management, and peer
behaviors and support, market competition, and nature of subordinates, among other factors.
Therefore, workplace factors mentioned above are key factors which cause stress among
individuals.
