| Abstract: | Most organizations attain high performance by saddling employees with overload of work in order to meet deadline and this has psychological and physical effects on the employees which sometimes results to something contrary to what these organizations want to achieve. Work stress has been a topic of increasing public and professional concern. Employees constant exposure to stress, if not handled effectively, can be destructive both for them in terms of the quality of their work and their physical and mental state and for the organization where they work. The purpose of this study was to find out the effect of work stress on employee performance in the case of Equatorial Business Group PLC. The study focused on four dimensions of stress; job monotony, work overload, role ambiguity, and time pressure. This study was explanatory in design with a quantitative research approach encompassing target population of 445, specifically focusing on 211 sample respondents. For this purpose, the study used primary data which was collected through a five point likert scale questionnaire. The correlation result showed that role ambiguity has significant and weak negative relation with job performance (r = -.225, n =162, p < .05). Similarly work overload has significant and moderate negative relation with performance (r = -.440, n =162, p < .05). Role ambiguity also showed a statistically significant and weak negative relation with performance (r = -.218, n =162, p < .05). Lastly time pressure resulted in significant and moderate negative relation with performance (r = -.210, n =162, p < .05). The result from multiple regression indicated that the beta value for job monotony is (beta = -.249, p >.05), for work overload (beta = -.949, p < .05), for role ambiguity (beta = -.188, p < .05), and for time pressure (beta = -.067, p < .05). Among the four independent variables, the regression analysis showed that work overload, role ambiguity and time pressure had statistically significant relation with job performance. The regression analysis also indicated that the adjusted R2value is .443 which indicated that 44.3% of variance in job performance is explained by job monotony, work overload, role ambiguity, and time pressure. This study recommended basic points such as; EBG should authorize employees to work on their own speed and ways; EBG should also start to implement job rotation to lessen monotonous tasks; EBG should also hire additional staffs specifically on front counter and workshop are to reduce work overload. Lastly EBG should also set logical and achievable deadlines to reduce time pressure. |
