Proposed Project: Identifying problematic stress with in service oriented businesses Work can cause stress and also be affected by it. Stress causes many problems for American businesses today. One of the major sources of stress in a person's life can be his or her job. Deadlines, problems with coworkers, boss trouble, and long hours can all contribute to feelings of being overwhelmed and helpless. Fortunately, there are ways to combat the stress that the workplace can bring. Often, researchers define stress as the psychological and physiological conditions that a person experiences when they perceive a situation as threatening, harmful, or demanding. This means that whenever we experience a change in our environment, we may experience stress. Whether we do or not depends on how we perceive the event. So what is stressful for one person might not be for another. Many factors influence how you interpret events including. At a personal level, work stressors are related to depression, anxiety, general mental distress symptoms, heart disease, ulcers, and chronic pain (Sauter, Hurrell, & Cooper, 1989). Employees who are unable to exert control over their lives at work are more likely to experience work stress and are therefore more likely to have impaired health (see Sutton & Kahn, 1984) In general, job control is the ability to exert influence over one's environment so that the environment becomes more rewarding and less threatening. Stress can come from many different sources. Stress from your personal life can also compound problems in the workplace. Thus, further research must address problematic stress with-in service oriented businesses in order to promote a productive, less aggravated, sounder, medium in the work place. In the work place, service oriented jobs can be an extreme workload, not only in terms of number of hours of work expected, but also in terms of the complexity of the work and frequent change in work demands...
