Identifying and managing the impact of stress during organisational restructuring

Abstract

In today’s world stress has become an ongoing phenomenon within organisations. To enable staff to perform to their utmost potential it is important to manage stress particularly during organisational restructuring. Although certain amount of stress can enhance a person’s performance, however too much stress can have a reverse impact on a person’s health resulting in lower productivity (Belmonte, 2008). Therefore the aim of this research is to identify and determine how stress can effectively be managed within organisations to enhance staff effectiveness and performance.

In order to determine some of the common factors that cause stress during organisational restructuring the researcher identified eight issues that have been highlighted by various authors and researchers with regards to stress. Thus determining if stress was experienced and ways to manage the impact of stress better during organisational restructuring while identifying staff performance related issues to achieve better end results, it is important to acquire staff’s perspective within an organisation that is currently undergoing restructuring.

A quantitative research method was adopted to collect data from a large sample of participants regarding the factors that cause stress during organisational restructuring. Surveys were carried out to determine if stress was present and if it was how stress can best be managed in order to minimise the impact it has on staff performance by acquiring individual opinions of people. This helped the researcher in identifying the positives and negatives of how stress was experienced by staff members and if it could have been better managed thus addressing this research topic. The researcher designed the questionnaire specifically for this study. The survey was distributed electronically to 291 participants comprising of staff from Faculty A at a TEO-Tertiary Education Organisation in Auckland and the response rate was 20.3%.

The findings of the study demonstrate high positive results with regards to the eight common factors that cause stress within organisations during organisational restructuring including some of the stress management issues. This indicates that stress was not managed up to staff expectations during the restructuring at the chosen TEO-Tertiary Education Organisation. The research variables that were investigated concurrently comprised of staff age, employment category (management, administration, and lecturers) and years of service along with staff level of designation. The findings also demonstrate a medium to high positive result between staff category and the eight stress factors.