Occupational Stress and Coping Strategies among Teaching Professionals: An Empirical Study in Technical Institutions in India

Abstract

Stress is a natural and unavoidable aspect of life experienced by all individuals in both professional and personal life. Reducing occupational stress has become the greatest challenges to the health of working people and to the well-being of their work organisations. With the advent of technology and globalisation, the nature of work in various organisations has gone through drastic changes over the century. It is still changing at whirlwind speed. These changes have touched all professions including teaching. Teachers’ role has now become highly competitive and achievement oriented. Increasing demands of the workplace have increased stress. The major stress factors are anchored in the in-class structure and in the organisational structure. A long-term consequence of stress results diminished quality of work life due to physical, emotional and attitudinal exhaustion in the individual. In the present study, an attempt is made to identify sources of stress and consequent stress levels among technical institution teachersand to identify the coping strategies used by teachers to cope with stress effectively. Teachers from technical institutions including engineering and non-engineering disciplines and with varied experience constituted the sample of the study. Occupational Stress Index (OSI) by Srivastava and Singh was used to collect data. Teachers were found to be moderately highly stressed on sub-scales of role overload, role conflict, responsibility for persons, powerlessness and others of OSI.