Introduction Definition of stress is a mental or emotional strain resulted from adverse or demanding situation
Introduction
Definition of stress is a mental or emotional strain resulted from adverse or demanding situation (Oxford University Press, 2014). Stress is a common element in our everyday life, in which we may be motivated by it or overwhelmed by it. The common types of stressors are family, work, academic achievement, health issues and so on. According to “Exposure to Stress: Occupational Hazards in Hospitals”, occupational stress is when an employee exhibits harmful emotional or physiological responses when the work requirement does not meet his or her capabilities, needs and resources (2008). When an employee is unable to meet workplace demands or overworked, he or she is likely to be experiencing occupational stress. Given that an employee is unable to manage stress properly or regulate self wisely, it is possible that it will affect the productivity and outcome of work.
The advancement in Malaysian tertiary education sector has caused an increased in level of stress among lecturers in not only public universities but also private universities. According to a comparison study, the lecturers from private universities have higher level of stress compared to those who are serving in the public universities (Safaria, Othman & Nubli, 2011). As compared to the previous decades, competition among private universities has become stiffer as a result in catering the industrial demand. For instance, increment in student enrolment, growth in revenue, prestigious education offer and so on. The lecturers have to play a more dynamic role in teaching, facilitating, training and researching in order to mold many more expertise in different field. It is also the lecturers’ responsibility to sustain the status of university by contributing quality lectures and researches. Private universities have already started to follow the footsteps of public universities to excel and become a research university, in which it has exceeded the main role of the lecturers imparting knowledge and skills to the students.
Tertiary level of education in Malaysia is divided into Research university and non research university. non research university has two different branches, which are referred as focus university and comprehensive university. Research university allocates more focus in research other than teaching, administrative work and consultation (“The Malaysian Higher Education System – An Overview”, 2015). A lecturer in research university will not only teach but also invest their time and efforts into seeking for research grant, attending conference and meetings, invigilating exams, managing course, improving syllabus and providing academic advice to the students. They are responsible to contribute a number of researches for university’s publication purpose throughout their career. Research universities were recognized by their respective area. For example, Universiti Malaysia is known for its success in bionic prosthetics, Universiti Sains Malaysia in archaeology and Universiti Putra Malaysia in paddy plantation (“Malaysian research universities obtain RM7.17b from investments”, 2017).
The lecturers are experiencing role conflict as the private institution is expecting lecturers to play various role as well as being very demanding towards lecturers in order to keep the world ranks (Asmawi, Omar & Zakaria, 2015). They are expected to maintain the university ranking in different records such as QS world university ranking, and Times Higher Education World University Rankings. The unbearable stress experienced will lead to low productivity, absenteeism, and increased rate of accidents on and off workplace (CWA, 2014). Lecturers may be overly concerned in research publish and neglected their main duty as an academician to educate and transfer skills to the students. Ineffective lectures or tutorial may not be able to provide sufficient knowledge to the students. Lecturers may successfully complete the syllabus on time but due to frivolous attitude of them, students cannot benefit much along the semester.
The difference between public and private universities may also bring about stress to the universities academicians. Government has bestowed on public universities with subsidies, research grant and direct funding. Whereas the private universities are not able to enjoy such privilege but to rely on corporate investment, generous funding from alumni and students under the Private Higher Educational Institutions Act 1996 (“Public And Private Universities – Is The “Product” Any Different?”, 2014).
This study mainly focuses on stress among university lecturers in Malaysia. Reviews based on several journal articles were done in to identify what are the different sources of stress as well as effective solutions to reduce or overcome the stress level experienced.
Research Issue
The issue of our research is that university lecturers are experiencing occupational stress in which it affects their work performance especially for those who are working under research universities. Prevalence of occupational stress among university staffs has been reported in a number of recent studies. Lecturers who works in public university experienced 23.3% prevalence of occupational stress (Huda, 2004). A cross sectional study was conducted after few years and found that prevalence of stress was 26.2% among 61 lecturers from a variety of faculties in another public university (Nur Aqilah, Juliana, 2012).
A research conducted in Malaysia revealed that the level of job stress experienced by lecturers in public university was at the mean of 37.8 while the private university lecturers suffer 42.7 mean level of job stress (Safaria, Othman, & Nubli, 2011). It can be observed that lecturers who work in a private university setting are encountering more work related stress as compared to those who are in public university.
They have to dedicate their time and effort into performing different roles, which is no longer solely as an educator. As mentioned above, lecturers ought to multitask due to the fierce competition among universities in Malaysia. They are receiving demands to attend conference, prepare teaching materials, provide academic consultation, organize teaching plan, carry out practical or theoretical teaching, and publish researches and others.
If an educator cannot manage stress effectively, it will project a negative impact on students (Phillips, Dil Sen, & McNamee, 2007). Students may find it difficult to catch up with the speed of teaching in class as the lecturers are rushing to complete the syllabus instead of following the pace of students in acquiring information. Lecturers would choose to spoon feed the students as it is less time consuming and less work. However, this type of teaching is not encouraged, as it will be students become passive learners whereby they have lower creativity and sense-making, they cannot master the complexity of content, last but not least they are not up for challenges or obstacles (Dehler & Welsh, 2014).
Research Objective
1) To investigate the effects of stress on university lecturers.
2) To find out possible effective solution that might be helpful to cope stress in university lecturers.
Literature Review
Effects of Stress
The teaching profesion can be said as one of the best careers as academics get to learn and educate the young generation as the same time. However in the recent years, it is said that this profesion has become a stressful job due to many factors (Ravichandran & Rajendran, 2007). According to Choi, Ibrahim and Tan (2014), the main goal of providing lecturers in a classroom context is to help students to gain knowledge effectively and efficiently. For a formal university lecturer, the daily tasks include teaching, conducting research and civil administration. Lecturers need to face demands from the university management as well as the society. Hence, it is significant that they manage their work stress efficiently so that they could work better in a stress-free environment.
There are various effects of stress that may influence the lectures’ lifestyle. One of the effects of stress is the decrease in job performance and life satisfaction of the lecturers (Pan, Shen, Liu, Yang, ; Wang, 2015). When there is a high level of stress, the level of their life dissatisfaction will automatically increase. This circumstance will result in the high level of turnover intentions, and can even urge in burnout, depression and anxiety. The job performance also depends on the existence of the emotion involved, such as being anxious and worried. If the lecturers feel stressful, the anxious emotion will affect their teaching system as well (Tijani, 2015). Besides, those unmarried lecturers will demonstrate a high level of job stress as compared to those married lecturers because they receive less social support from their peers and family members. As a result, this study examined that the higher the stress, the lower the job performance, job satisfaction, and life satisfaction among the lecturers (Khan, Aqeel, ; Riaz, 2014).
Next, another effect of stress is inadequate in the intrinsic motivation from the lecturers’ careers (Karatepe & Tekinkus, 2006). Intrinsic motivation is a type of internal forces and rewards which involve meaning, learning, enjoyment, and exploration that motivate an individual to achieve his or her goal (Cherry, 2018). When stress occurs, the lecturers will have no internal motivation. They feel that they are being in a tense working environment, and lose their interest and enjoyment in teaching. They will do their minimal best so as to get through the workday (Leonard, 2018). It is easy for them to be distract by non-work activities and they will not pay full attention on their job and thus, lose their direction. Subsequently, the lecturers will tend to have low job performance and low self-esteem.
Emotional exhaustion and depersonalization is also caused by stress among the lecturers (Azeem, 2013). Emotional exhaustion is a kind of emotion where an individual may feel fatigue and frustration in their life (Salami, 2009). When the lecturers are overburdened with stress, emotional exhaustion occurred. This situation will result in various types of physical symptoms, for instance, insomnia, headaches, ulcers, and sexual dysfunction whereas psychological symptoms, such as testiness, tension, and frustration (Williams, Lawrence, Campbell, & Spiehler, 2009). Moreover, depersonalization is defined as a type of negative feeling that exploit dissociation, separation, and disconnection from the surrounding (Salami, 2009). When lecturers experience burnout due to stress, they might feel emotionally numb, and cannot respond and control the behavior to the people around.
Not only that, in regards to Ismail, Yao and Yunus (2009), job satisfaction is directly proportional to occupational stress which induces an issue where university lecturers have low job satisfaction due to challenging tasks such as being urged to achieve university goals. It is obvious that in this modern era where competition is almost unavoidable, the impact of such demanding job will only increase work stress among the academics.
There are also some late effects that will be encountered by lecturers while having stress. The response to stress may be delayed. Appearing several days or even weeks after the stressful situation it causes a great confusion, because symptoms that arise are not assigned to a situation that caused them. Long-term effects of stress include: apathy, hopelessness, helplessness, passivity and changes in the attitude towards oneself and others. The risk of diseases referred to as psychosomatic or stress-related, which include diabetes, hypertension, gastric and duodenal ulcers, migraines, ischemic heart disease and skin disorders, is conditioned by psychosocial factors occurring in the workplace. In contrast, health effects of a stress include diseases of the digestive, nervous and cardiovascular systems. They can also include diseases associated with impaired functioning of the immune system (Wozny, Polowczyk & Zygmunt, 2015).
Stress at workplaces is considered to be a factor that may affect productivity and organizational effectiveness thereby lowering employee performance, absenteeism and turnover. Stress to work overloads which leads to health complains and social isolation respectively. Physiological effects of stress have been documented as well, including increased heart rate, blood pressure, outbursts of anger, unremitting and anxiety. Moreover stress in workplace also increases the prevalence of heart attack, also effects of stress includes depression, schizophrenia, anxiety, disorders, and women develop genital herpes and flare-ups of inflammatory bowel diseases (Addison & Yankyera, 2015).
Stress and burnout are an ‘occupational hazard’ for professionals including teaching professionals. There are teachers who leave the profession because they cannot successfully deal with the stress. This affects the journey of their profession because basically most of them have a dream in their profession and when the quit from their job their journey ends there because of stress. This study also shows that teacher’s frustration was shown by irritability, increased anger but was also associated with depression, anxiety and apathy. Secondly, major emotional responses included the inability to concentrate and high levels of unproductivity along with psychosomatic reactions like stomach upset, pain and skin disorders (Hussain, 2010).
Ill-health was the most reported effect of stress and burnout. It emerged that sometimes some of the lecturers had to take a sick leave as a result of the stress they experienced. Anxiety and frustration was identified as the second effect of stress on lecturers. This is consistent with the interview data collected from the participants. The data suggested that some of the academic staff were anxious and frustrated most of the time as a result of the stress imposed on them by their numerous tasks (Kusi, Mensah ; Gyaki, 2014).
Solutions of Stress ( Coping Strategies )
There are several effective strategies that are appropriate to deal with the effects of the stress. First of all, one of the methods is the improvement in the lecturers’ self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is a belief and confidence in the ability of oneself to achieve the goal (Carey, 2018). According to Leila Gholamia (2015), there is a negative relationship between the self-efficacy and stress of the lecturers. Hence, it is necessary for the lecturers to improve their self-efficacy in order to overcome their stress. If the lecturers have a high level of self-efficacy, they are able to enhance their own achievements and success when facing stressful circumstances. Generally, lecturers who feel themselves as a professor in teaching will tend to manage the stressors in a right way because they are confident enough to trust their own self. Therefore, from the result of the study, the higher the level of self-efficacy, the lower the level of stress occurs (Leila Gholamia, 2015).
In addition, the lecturers also have to understand their personality traits in order to deal with the effects of the stress (Salami, 2011). This method helps the lecturers to understand more about themselves and have the awareness on their personal dispositions so as to decrease their stress. The lecturers can test their own personality through assessments provided by the career counsellors to establish some suitable coping methods to prevent the application of maladaptive coping skills. To further support this point, work overload and interruption from the students may result in the lecturers’ stress too. Hence, the lecturers should learn the techniques to handle the group behaviors and manage the time taken in order to balance their time and work distribution.
According to Nor Amalina, Huda, and Hejar (2016), the stress occurred when the lecturers work among 45 to 60 hours per week with a lot of tasks that need to be completed simultaneously. However, there is a method that used to cope with the effects of the stress, which is the nature landscape of the working environment. Natural surrounding such as garden, lake, and pasture is a great place for the lecturers to release themselves from stress on the job. They can take a deep breath or have a walk during the recess time whenever they feel tension (Wight, Chen, Dodd, ; Weiler, 2011).
Stress management is a process of using thoughts and actions to deal with stressful conditions to lower the stress levels through modifying strategy, avoid from threatening situation, moderate negative emotions, or rethink your thoughts about thinking (Joseph, 2013). Research suggests that novice lecturers may manage their role demands and responsibilities by attending the formal training courses such as Basic Teaching Course so that they can adapt to the university environment easily to meet the curriculum with students’ needs (Ibrahim, Mohamad, Rom & Shahrom, 2013). To further support this, based on a research done by Gmelch in 1993 as cited in Iqbal in 2011 , the tertiary education institution should offer the lecturers with the training programme including counseling skills, advising skills and principled negotiations with students so that they know the proper way to have effective interaction with the students. It is reported that a lecturer is expected to play different roles in his or her job scope such as a counsellor, a nurse, a social worker and even a guardian in dealing with students (Salami, 2009). Therefore, it is a must to have a wholesome training session to make the lecturers fit into such job roles so as to reduce occupational stress. Joseph (2013) concluded, the stress awareness and prevention can be acknowledged by conducting seminar, courses, and leaflets to promote the important of the lecturer well- being. In line to this statement, Raju and Rani (2012) emphasize the importance for offering the training for lecturers on physiological aspects of stress and environmental adjustment, emotional and mental control so as to they can perform well at work.
A study proposed that caring value should be encouraged in workplace environment to make the academic staffs to feel them as a part of the institution by communicate regularly. This will not only increase their sense of affiliation to the university, it also turns out to have positive impact on their occupational satisfaction (Iqbal, 2011). This strategy is supported by Reddy and Poornima (2012) in which they stated that the colleagues and the head of the department are motivated to fully support the lecturers in their teaching and research activities while the administration are encouraged to support and facilitate those lecturers so as to avoid burnout situation. Indeed, it is found that employees who are alert about their job requirements beyond their abilities and their physical and emotional responses which including time, instructions and support, will more easily fall into work-related stress (Kao & Chang, 2017).
In addition, when lecturers experiences heavy stress, the organizational support such as a ready- listen friendly dean should listen to their problem and offer help if needed as well such as providing counseling services (either a full-time employee assistance program or an outside counseling group) for the lecturers who face problems that may impair their job performance (International Handbook of Academic Research and Teaching, 2011). Hence, the support and recognition from upper management and organisation are crucial for lecturers to moderate their job stress and to reduce their job dissatisfaction (Mondal, Shrestha & Bhaila, 2011).
Occurrence of the stress depends on how we perceive it in any situations we are in. We can only attack the stressors when we change our perceptions toward a threatening condition (Raju & Rani, 2012). Cognitive-Behavioral Techniques are the techniques that used to change the thoughts and actions of a person to handle the job- related stress, including: 1) cognitive appraisal technique that teaches individuals to consider their perspective on viewing the stressful situation to evaluate the severity of a stressor; 2) cognitive restructuring technique is based on the belief of an individual towards other people or events outside of themselves that has responsibility for how their feeling; 3) cognitive rehearsal technique helps individuals to visualize a potentially stressful event before it occurs and practicing how to respond. These cognitive-behavioral interventions help individuals to acknowledge how their pessimistic has distorted their thoughts and make them become stressors besides they learn to replace their pessimistic thinking with optimistic thinking (International Handbook of Academic Research and Teaching, 2011).
Another technique to handle the stress is the Deep Breathing technique in which an individual receives instruction to assume a comfortable position and breathe deeply to avoid the shallow breathe and muscle tension that corresponds to stress. Moreover, meditation as a systematic method of concentration, reflection, or concentrated thinking i specifically designed to help individuals reach a deep state of mental and physical calmness and relaxation to move away accumulated stress. Individuals who meditate learn to tolerate problems better with by calming the mind and removing anxiety as well as enhancing mental alertness (International Handbook of Academic Research and Teaching, 2011).
According to Abdullah, Hamid, Shaif, Shamsuddin, & Wahab (2016), employees who work in concrete- structured buildings, will experience Sick Building Syndrome (SBS) which is defined as a collection of symptoms includes headache, nose and throat irritation, dry cough and itchiness without knowing the root causes of them. Also, they added that the employees’ stress level will be affected as they are exposed to the environmental stressors such as temperature, air and noise in long term. For instance, informal work climates and open office layouts are initially designed to promote flexibility and bring closeness between the colleagues. However, these designs have created the interruptions (background noise, nearby conversations and sounds of educational equipment) for employees to focus on their work. This leads one cannot accomplish time-sensitive tasks on time. (Hassan ; Jazli, 2015). Indirectly, this will lead to stress among the lecturers as well. Therefore, in order to reduce time pressure feeling among the lecturer, Blazer (2010) proposes that educational institution can provide lecturer the time management workshops to learn the proper ways to keep track in spending time using “to do” lists, weekly schedules, and monthly planning calendars so as to cope with the time constraints. Indeed, these results indicate a need for an environment that enables the social dynamics of interaction, thereby facilitating the creation, and transference, of knowledge. The office manager is required to create an working environment that allows the social dynamics of interaction, facilitating the creation, and transmission of knowledge as the physical environment plays an important role in achieving the optimum balance between interaction and distraction, by offering various types of work space, such as collaborative work space and space for private individual work (Haynes, 2008).
According to Clipa and Boghean (2015), the enhancement of support by the administrative staff can help to reduce stress in the workplace. This is because when support is given to the educators especially lecturers in university, they will get to feel the positivity around them hence increase their productivity and quality of delivery. It is no doubt that with better colleagues, one especially the academics will be motivated to work harder as they feel the harmonious environment provided by the people around them. Furthermore, as stated by Harzer and Ruch (2015), managing one’s intellectual strength will contribute to coming up with decent ideas in order to solve problems and analyze circumstances. This helps an individual, specifically university lecturers in a significant way where it will be easier for them when it comes to coping with stress in their workplace. One of the most important aspects of intellectual strength is critical thinking and it can be defined as the process of evaluating information to formulate strategies. When it comes to university lecturers, by organizing their intellectual strengths, they will always face problems in a positive way and it is for sure stress will not take a toll on them.
Physical exercise is immensely beneficial in managing occupational stress. Exercise helps reduce occupational stress not only by the biochemical it produces, but by reducing others produced by stress. When a person experience occupational stress the sympathetic nervous system produces cortisone and hormones that if left unaltered in the blood stream produce harmful effect on blood vessels. Exercise releases helpful chemicals in our brain and body that are good for body use. Occupational stress often produces exercise tense muscles, particularly in the neck, shoulder and calf muscles, exercise activities can help loose these up, both part of a general warm-up period and during the main workout. Regular exercise reduces amount of adrenal hormones the body releases in response to occupational stress. Also exercise activity releases great amounts of endorphins, the powerful, pain-relieving, mood elevating chemicals in the brain (Olaitan, Lanre, Talabi, Ebun, Olumorin, Olabode, Braimoh & Thomas 2014).
Adapting to changing condition is one of the ways to cope with the stress that lecturers undergo in their workplace. Lecturers often lose their sense of security and confidence when rigidly stick to the agreed timetable and rhythm. Developing skills in the field of smooth transition from one exercise to another will eliminate interference with the course of the lessons. The biggest challenge for lecturers (not just the beginners) is to maintain discipline in the classroom and its effective management. Achieving the desired level of control over the class depends on careful preparation and organisation at the beginning of the trimester. Continuous improvement of the professional competence is also a way of dealing with stress by lecturers, because the sense of own professional competence prevents the risk of mental burden, emotional drainage and as a consequence occupational burnout (Wozny, Polowczyk & Zygmunt, 2015).
Significance of Research
Lecturers who experience “extreme stress” while performing their duties are encouraged to seek counselling at the education ministry’s psychology and counselling division. Former Deputy Minister Datuk P. Kamalanathan said the move was to prevent any untoward incident involving teachers. Under Datuk P. Kamalanathan’s supervision around 200 teachers underwent counselling on 2017.
At the Bumiputera Education Roadshow in Kuala Nerang, Kedah, on April 22 2017, Education Minister Datuk Seri Mahdzir Khalid talked about providing assistance to teachers suffering from stress or depression. Basically from this two events there is a direct hint that people who work in teaching profession are easily experience stress.
Stress among teaching professionals should be get rid of because their stress will affect their performance and it will lead to affect the performance of the students. It will be chain effect, for instance when the lecturer in in stress and couldn’t teach their students properly. This will lead to low performance of the students and this will increase the stress of the lecturer even higher.
This study basically can help them to identify their symptoms of stress and will help them to find a way to cope with stress. Some stress related symptom and effects are unidentifiable. Therefore, it is difficult for them to identify their symptoms are prompt to their stress. If a person goes through this study they can easily identify about the effects they are going through by stress and can take further actions to prevent it
Besides, this study also provides the insight on circumstances that will bring about stress among university lecturers. This will contribute in a way that lecturers would get to know about the causes of their workplace stress and further alter their surrounding in order to work in a more relaxed way. Through this way, they will get to increase their productivity and create a harmonious environment between people around them.
Limitation
Based on the journal articles that we reviewed for our topic “Work Stress Among University Lecturers,” we can see that most of the lecturers are having occupational stress in their workplace. However, the stress issue among the lecturers can be solved with the suggestions from the journal articles.
Apart from the contributions of authors from the journal articles that we reviewed, we have found some of the weaknesses from the journal.
First and foremost, one of the weaknesses that we found in the journal articles is that some of them are from different countries. Because of different cultures, the effects that contribute to the stress and its interventions suggested for lecturers may not applicable for our country, Malaysia. Indeed, according Jayabalan (2012) reported that a lecturer named Meera who teaching in Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation (APU) work at least 9 hours per day. It means that she needs to finish all her jobs done with limited time even if she encounters workload condition. This makes her feel stressed up and her workplace environment will become more tensed (Abdullah, Hamid, Shaif, Shamsuddin ; Wahab, 2016). Furthermore, our country adapts colletivism culture, that strictly follow hierarchical order and power distance pratices. In other words, we tend to care about other’s feeling more than our own feeling and conform to majority. Therefore, when the lecturers, especially the novice lecturers, feel time constraint towards the teaching and research, they may not ask for other colleagues’ help to share their jobs. Indeed in 2018, where it is can be used as reference for other local researchers in a collectivist country. Countries which practise individualism culture are more open-minded in expressing their feeling towards the job tasks given and the feedback for improvement for them to practice work- life balance. It can be seen in a study with topic “Lecturers’ Occupational Stress and Productivity in Kwara State Owned Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria” by Tijani in 2015, where it is conducted in non-Asia country.
Besides, it is true to say that most the journal articles are using only quantitative method (survey method) which does not adequately provide underlying insight to be answered by the educators from different countries. The lecturers as the respondents may interpret each question superficially and choose to select what they want to answer, which cause the occurrence of biased and dishonored answer in this study. Meanwhile, during these study being conducted, various opinion from the public is being expressed through person-administrated survey. A quantitative data fails to deliver an in-depth description for respondents that the insightful- knowledge towards their preference is not fully exposed to this research. Moreover, in line with this limitation is the narrowed focus of target respondent. That is, some of the journal articles are focusing only on lecturer population’s from one or two campuses from one country, which may not represent the whole population of lecturers for whole country. This can been in the journal article with its topic ” Job Stress And Its Determinants Among Academic Staff In A University In Klang Valley, Malaysia ” conducted by Nor Amalina M.Z., Huda B.Z., and Hejar A.R. in 2016, where its respondents used are selected from one place that is Klang Valley. Therefore, it is advised for future researchers to use mixed method (quantitative method combined with qualitative method) in their research design to minimize the weaknesses of solely using quantitative research design.
As for the language part, in our country, some of the researchers have done their studies in Malay version that we cannot apply them into assessment whereas the journal articles that we used are all in English version that only readible for those who know English language very well. This means that the English version designed questionnaires can be easily understood and answered by those lecturers who use English as medium in their workplace while the lecturers who onknow their national language may misunderstandings during answering the questionaires. It is true that inaccurate findings may lead to bias and affect the reliable of the study conducted. Furthermore, the researchers used different types of survey forms to determine the stressors among the lecturers and this may lead to inconsistant findings that may make the lecturers confused in choosing the most suitable stress- coping strategies for their current situation. Another example is the journal article entitled ” Teacher Stress and Coping: The Role of Personal and Job Characteristics ” by Alhijaa in 2014, its finding in coping with stress among teacher may not be available for lecturer who needs to make balance between the teaching and doing researches.
Last but not least, the weaknesses that we noticed from the research is the reliability of the article as these researches are done based on the comments and thoughts from only less respondents. Besides, even when of them are conducted in latest 10 years from now which may bring about the latest issues about stress occurrence among lecturers and bring awareness of public towards the lecturers in such a stressful workplace environment, there are limited studies conducted about the stress issues in Malaysia. So, it is suggested that other researchers to conduct related studies in comparison between the eastern and western settings in the future in order to provide better insight on the stress issue among university lecturers.
Conclusion
As for the conclusion, stress is not something to be taken lightly of. Throughout this study, we managed to find out the effects of stress that greatly affect the well-being of lecturers and people around them. It is undoubted that academics could not avoid stress as it is slowly becoming a part of their life. However, lecturers have the responsibility of managing stress efficiently in order to create a better working environment just so their working life will be made easier and more lively. Findings from journals by different authors around the world could be applied in their workplace and this could help them in formulating good strategies to counter their work stress. This is mainly because university lecturers in the modern era are now facing higher demands from both the university management and also the students. In short, the effects of stress and its solutions that have been written in this study provides a comprehensive account for all lecturers so as to be aware of their workplace stress and learn the stress coping strategies. It is true that the management plays a crucial role in helping lecturers to work harmony with their work- related stress by operating proper stress management policy in university and implementing the stress management training for them to identify and cope with the stress as well as the functioning of two way communications among lecturers and management to recognize the stress related issues among lecturers.
