Impact of Work Stress on Employee Performance: A Study among the Executive Officers of State Universities in Sri Lanka

Stress is a one of the challenges that employees experience in a work place almost everywhere in the world. In the world today, work is the primary cause for stress in any kind of job since it is demanding and changing in the competitive world. for its employees to perform their job effectively and efficient manner. Work stress may attribute to employee’s life imbalance which may tend to depression and conflicts such as workplace conflict, role conflict, role ambiguity and workload. Main purpose of the present study was to explore the impact of work stress on employee performance among executive officers of State Universities in Sri Lanka. Five (5) stress factors; such as role ambiguity, underutilization of skills, work overload, organizational climate and relationships in organization and personality factors were identified as the independent variables as per literature review. Selected method for conducting the research was survey method. All the executive officers attached to state universities (17 conventional universities functioning under University Grants Commission) comprised the population for the study and convenient sampling technique was used. Primary data was gathered though self-administered questionnaire with 5 point Likert scale range of strongly agree (5) as highest range and strongly disagree (1) as lowest range and the questionnaire was distributed as a google form via WhatsApp groups and emails. 77 responses from executive officers were collected and analysed using descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, logistic regression analysis (with ANOVA) and Cronbach Alpha. As per reliability statistics, it indicates that data set is more reliable (Cronbach alpha value = 0.9292) in the study. The level of stress on employee performance as per respondents’ feedback was identified that the almost all the respondents expressed their view as neutral (neither agree nor disagree). It interprets that stress is somewhat ordinary fact and executive officers in the State Universities in Sri Lanka may not consider the stress as an influencing factor that affect their work performance. Correlation Analysis results of the study shows strong correlation (r=0.891) between work stress and employee performance at significance level of 0.05. As per regression analysis, stress factors of role ambiguity (p=0.036) and personality factors (p=0.002) have significant impact on employee performance while there is no significant relationship between other 3 work stress factors: underutilization of skills (p=0.941), work overload (p=0.668) and organizational climate and relationships in organization (0.500) and employee performance.