Stress Affecting Career: Sources, Effects, and Coping Strategies

This article discusses the sources and effects of stress on financial executives and how to cope with it. It covers both organizational and personal factors that contribute to stress, such as workload, poor physical work conditions, lack of control, poor communication, and ethical issues. The article also provides coping strategies, including individual and action strategies, to reduce stress and improve job performance.

Running head: STRESS AFFECTING CAREER
STRESS AFFECTING CAREER
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1STRESS AFFECTING CAREER
Each of the employee of an organization faces stress with the responsibilities. This
stress involves both physiological as well as psychological reactions to the external events in
forms of threatening. Stress creates unpleasant state for the employees but to different
individuals, stress functions differently. As mentioned before, all the employees get affected
by workplace stress but the people who work in the emergency services or any consumer
eservice sector, feel more stress than others (Siu, 2017). In every fields, the executives of the
organizations feel more stress than their inferiors. For the financial executives, stress factor
has a far reaching and more intense effect. The stressors are like panic button and alarm the
executives as they have more responsibility in an organizational structure. Stress after the
health of the executives both physically and mentally. There are different sources of stress,
knowledge of which has become important for the business managers as well as the owners
(Tetrick & Winslow, 2015). This is import so that such problems do not affect the decision or
productivity of the finance executives. The stressors for the financial executives can be
divided in two different segments. Some of are the external or organizational factors and
others are personal or individual factors.
Among the organizational factors of stress, work over load is the most import. The
workload can be a synthetic and universal descriptor of the effects of concentrating in
physical, mental and cognitive level. There are sense of ambiguity levitating the issue of
whether the present burden is a situation or even a consequence of the work activity
(Antoniou & Cooper, 2017). For the financial executive, the responsibility remains much
higher as well as challenging than their subordinates. They work for longer hours and
concentrate more in their tasks due to financial accountabilities. In some case, with change of
time, when these executives do not have such workloads taxing them constantly, feel that
their skills are being underutilized or unused.

2STRESS AFFECTING CAREER
For the financial executives, stress can be resulted from the poor physical work
condition. Poor equipment can send the financial executives into morale tailspins. It becomes
stressful for them when they cannot fill orders and meet deadlines due to poor physical work
condition. Excessive heat, cold, noise, uncomfortable seating, inadequate lighting and
malfunctioning equipment are the components of poor working condition (Jacobs, Johnson &
Hassell, 2017). This leads to the feeling of unappreciation and gradually transforms into
stress. In some cases, the incapability of executing one particular job can be stressor for the
executives. This lack of control may be originated from the insufficient knowledge and
expertise over one section of the job. Change in job duties and new regulation can result into
lack of control of the financial executives. The lack of interpersonal communication among
the employees can be a reason of poor working relationship. In such cases, the financial
executives lack control on their subordinates. This is the reason why they feel difficulty to get
a job done quickly and urgent situation is created. With increasing urgency, the time pressure
also increases which create path for stress on the financial executives greatly.
In some cases, due to poor communication, the financial executives fell stress to face
or communicate with the stakeholders or the customers at the time of any conflict. Due to
poor communication, these executives feel ostracized in spite of being very efficient in their
own fields. Thus they started to feel isolated from the other executives of the organization or
feel out of the loop therefore, feel stressed with their job (Whitfield & Cachia, 2018). In
addition to this, the financial executives may fail to keep their employees informed about
important changes to their business or fail to manage the incidents of workplace bullying or
harassment. These ethical issues can be potential stressors for the executives. From the
individual perspectives, excessive competitiveness, hostility and impatience lead to feeling of
stress. These elements amplify when the desire to dominate the employees by any means gets

3STRESS AFFECTING CAREER
added in the mind of the executives. This increase the stress level of the employees and the
executives as well.
In order to cope up with such challenges faced by the financial executives, individual
coping strategies can be employed. This include meditation and free hand exercise which are
really capable to reduce personal stress. Actions strategies such as diving right in and
managing the issue head on can increase efficiency of work methods and reduce work stress.
The financial executives can take voluntary absences or vacation for weeks (Whitaker,
Dearth-Wesley & Gooze, 2015). This will relieve stress for few days and the executives can
concentrate more after rejoin their job. This method can be applied along with cognitive
coping strategies where the executives will step back and think about all types of
possibilities. This will help them to reframe the stressors affecting them positively rather than
negatively.
In addition to this the financial executives can follow the method of groundwork,
where they socialize with the subordinates more, seek further information, communicate with
the customers and seek feedbacks directly. This will help them to reduce the problems of
communication and bounce new ideas. In releasing stress, the financial executives can
participate in the turnings so that they can learn the methods or technologies important for
running the new set up. This will increase expertise over every aspect of the job and thus
reduce stress factors. Through enhanced knowledge the executives will be able to provide
support to their subordinates which will increase scope for interpersonal communication. This
knowledge will increase resources and the executives can freely communicate with the
shareholders or the customers (Whitfield & Cachia, 2018). Team orientation can be a strategy
to share workload for the executives. The threat of domination and authoritative leadership
which is another cause of stress can be mitigated through improved relationship among the

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executives and the employees. Therefore, it can be concluded that stress can affect the
creativity and skills of the executives hence the reasons of stress must be eliminated.

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References:
Antoniou, A. S., & Cooper, C. L. (2017). Striving for a Stress-Free Workplace: Examining
the Role of Positive Personality on Coping and Burnout. In Coping, Personality and
the Workplace (pp. 129-142). Routledge.
Jacobs, S., Johnson, S., & Hassell, K. (2017). Managing workplace stress in community
pharmacy organisations: lessons from a review of the wider stress management and
prevention literature. International Journal of Pharmacy Practice.
Siu, O. L. (2017). Stress management techniques in the workplace. The Routledge
Companion to Wellbeing at Work, 284.
Tetrick, L. E., & Winslow, C. J. (2015). Workplace stress management interventions and
health promotion. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav., 2(1), 583-603.
Whitaker, R. C., Dearth-Wesley, T., & Gooze, R. A. (2015). Workplace stress and the quality
of teacher–children relationships in Head Start. Early Childhood Research
Quarterly, 30, 57-69.
Whitfield, M., & Cachia, M. (2018). How does workplace stress affect job performance? An
employee’s perspective. New Vistas, 3(2), 28-33.