EMPLOYEES STRESS, BURNOUT AND WORK PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW
Amina Syarfina Abu Bakar1 Jasmine Ahmad2 Mimi Fitriana Zaini3 Nur Raihan Abd Rahim4
1Faculty of Arts and Science, International University of Malaya-Wales, Malaysia, (E-mail:
2Faculty of Arts and Science, International University of Malaya-Wales, Malaysia, (E-mail:
3Faculty of Arts and Science, International University of Malaya-Wales, Malaysia, (E-mail:
4Faculty of Arts and Science, International University of Malaya-Wales, Malaysia, (E-mail:
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Abstract: Global pandemic of coronavirus disease COVID-19 affects the mental health of the individuals including the employees of higher education. Stress amongst the educators, burnout in excessive workload, adapting with the latest technology gives arduous to their work performance.
Hence, this study exposes the level of stress, burn out and work performance of the employees in higher education during the strike of the pandemic. The current exposure of mental health among the employees is guided through the use of the two research questions for the purpose of establishing the systematic review; 1) What are the causes that triggers the employees to experience stress and burnout?, and 2) How does the new normal of education affect their work performance and environment?. Searched literature from a published systematic review is applied to identify the different levels of mental health problems to include symptoms of stress, burnout disorders in depersonalization (DP), personal accomplishment (PA), and emotional exhaustion (EE). The work performance of employees is also included as the contingent factor. The current research synthesis is gained to develop a fundamental conceptual framework for the purpose of delivering the summary of the available primary resources. The current study produced summary results in reflection amongst the educators on the stress levels during the pandemic, feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion and high degrees of emotional and physical overextension. The employees cynical, distant and callous attitude towards work as well as reduced professional efficacy. This study hopes to support the employees’ work performance to shed light on the new normal of education in Malaysia especially in the aspect of mental health and employee’s overall performance.
Keywords: Mental Health, COVID-19, Employees, Stress, Burnout.
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1. Introduction
It is every employees’ dream to work in a stress-free organization, staying healthy mentally and be a star performer in the organization. Just as organization is made up of various elements, the human part of it has various characteristics. Both the human part of the organization and the environment in the organization reacts differently to changes and challenges. Senthilkumar (2018) defined stress as a state of tension when someone experiences pressure from extraordinary demands, constraints or opportunities. Stress is prone to occur in conditions
available for a person. It is believed that when the body receives stress or, it can increase the level of stress (Samad, Hashim, Moin, & Abdullah, 2010) and it can have positive or negative impact depending on how one responds to it. The term extraordinary demand, high demand, limited support and constraint seem to reflect the factors leading to stress. Meanwhile, occupational burnout syndrome is the direct result of a prolonged exposure to stressful working conditions (Galanakis, Alexandri, Kika, Lelekanou, Papantonopoulou, Stougiannou, & Tzani, 2020). Burnout can affect physical and mental health. The end result of these conditions is reduction in job performance. The concept of job performance explains the extent the targeted job is performed. From an individual perspective, it is the whole of the employee's behaviors exhibited in order to contribute to the effort of the organization to achieve its goals (Tekin &
Deniz, 2019). Therefore, stressful employees mean that the organization is stressful. This indicates that all kinds of problems caused by stress are reflected in business relations and business success by affecting the performance of the individual directly (Ozden, 2020). Stress, burnout and work performance are the three terms that are interrelated.
Shifting stress to be more of eu-stress, while maintaining good mental health and performing well at work is definitely more challenging in times of pandemic. Adjusting to the new norms in the work culture requires time, effort and energy. In the education sector, the academics and academic administrators, not only look into policies and guidelines but also the tools to engage with students and their learning. The research explored two research questions;
1) What are the causes that triggers the employees to experience stress and burnout? and 2) How does the new normal of education affect their work performance and environment? This research synthesis was gained to develop a fundamental conceptual framework for the purpose of delivering the summary of the available primary resources. This objective of the study hopes to support the employees’ work performance and to shed light on the new normal of education in Malaysia especially in the aspect of mental health and employee’s overall performance.
2. Literature Review
Mental Health and Work performance of the Employees
Mental health has become a major focus in an organisation. It is globally recognised that mental health of the employees is one of the strongest key factors to determine their performance at the workplace. Although many factors contribute to workers’ mental health and well-being, there is increasing evidence that the workplace environment makes a significant contribution (Lee, 2016). In a good psychosocial environment, work can be beneficial for workers’ mental health, giving them a greater sense of social inclusion, identity and status, opportunities for development and increased confidence.
Mental health issues, however, have been identified as the decrease in psychological well-being, linked to higher levels of psychopathological symptoms (Lamers et al., 2015).
Those who possess low levels of psychological well-being and exhibit low levels of happiness, along with high levels of depression (Flouri & Buchanan, 2003) develop signs and symptoms of psychopathological problems due to poor mental health. A survey has found that Malaysian employees are overworked, and sleep deprived, with 51% suffering from at least one dimension of work-related stress, 53 % getting less than seven hours of sleep in a 24-hour period. Mental
health problems are on the rise among employees resulting in 22% with financial concerns and 20% stress at work (Ram, 2019).
Stress at the workplace is typically a response to an overwhelming workload that causes physical tensions. While burnout involves a persistent stressor that is continuous (Maslach & Leiter, 2017) and is described as the absence of the employees’ well-being in adaptable learning environment (Mehdinezhad, 2015), stress postulates inadequate mechanisms among the employees to cope with workload or tension that leads to reduced ability in the work performance (Chandra, 2020). Due to poor coping strategies, stress may eventually lead to other negative patterns of behaviors which manifest through poor performance among the employees (Busari, 2014). Employees’ job satisfaction is also rated from their emotional engagement with positive and negative impacts on their career satisfaction and growth, with physical fatigue, disengagement, and psychological distress as the appealing components.
A collective survey in the earlier reviews emphasized on the significant impact of the employees’ mental health problems. Fevre and colleagues (2003) highlighted the importance of having occupational stress interpretation in an organisation to determine the different levels of stress as the emerging issue among employees’ low level of performance. The concept of eustress was then introduced to the employees for their balancing mental health ability at the workplace with the other determinant factors of their overall health indicators. Lau (2002) in his research on mental health issues during childhood, highlighted the occurrence of prolonged stress and other psychopathological consequences among the working adolescents. The study significantly elaborated the determinant factors of the workers’ mental health as the results of poor healthcare mechanism and health belief system in their earlier years impacting the current mental and emotional state. Naz and colleagues (2003) further discussed the prolonged consequences of the imbalance of workers’ mental health in a few other psychopathological interpretations in the occurrence of schizophrenia and other schizophreniform disorders. Zaph (2002) in his further study on emotion at work and psychological well-being, stated that the role of organizational leaders and other important human resource management personnels in managing the employees’ mental health was highly important to improve the employees’ key performance and other significant goal-directed performances at the workplace. The employees’ poor mental health and stressors at the workplace are the leading factors to the occurrence of not only psychological degradation resulting in burn-out and other psychological stress and mental diseases, but also affecting their physical illnesses like hypertension, diabetes and cardiovascular conditions, amongst others (Cohen at al., 2007; Chrousos, 2009; Rajgopal, 2010).
In the recent studies on the employees’ mental health problems and their consequences, numerous researchers continuously discussed the occurrence of employees’ low level performance at the workplace. Glazer and Liu (2017) emphasized that stress at the workplace contributed to the significant impacts in psychological and mental disorders and therefore, to minimize the problems by implementing systematic coping skills which employees could manage. Stress, anxiety, depression and other issues in mental health of the employees contribute to the significant change in their productivity at the workplace. The role of emotion regulation to manage stress and other issues of employees’ mental health was also
importantly highlighted in an organization as one of their coping skills to enhance their work performance and productivity (Grant, 2013). In the earlier review, Chao (2011) discussed the impacts of using a focused-stress management strategy to include social support, problem- focused coping, and avoidant coping skills of the employees to manage dress and maintain their well-being. Herr and colleagues (2018) also emphasized on the significant long-term effectiveness of stress management at the workplace. The study focused on the effect of stress management coping strategies in the adaptation of changes in perceived stress reactivity on the employees’ mental health, indicating the regular pattern of sleeping enhanced the balance of their mental capacity at the workplace. More specifically, Nor and colleagues (2017) focused on the effectiveness of stress management among the female workers for maintaining their mental health at the workplace. The study discussed determinant factors to increase female workers’ performances were linked to their significant intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and the time management skills. While the emphasis was placed on the rate of increased productivity among workers by frequent workers’ management skills implementation, mental health challenges dominated the occurrence of stress, anxiety and depression among workers (Michaelides & Zis, 2019). The study was then supported by another finding that employees’
stress levels at the workplace could be reduced by inducing other strategies in training and development of employees’ capacity to maintain. The study highlighted the role of human resource professionals in managing employees’ mental health (Tan at al., 2020).
3. Methodology
The methodological plans of the current study will be the observation of the simple selection of reviews from the previous literature attempting to collect representative evidence on the employees’ mental health and their work performance. Therefore it operationally defines the review questions and defines the scope of the review on the two important research issues; 1) the causes that trigger the employees to experience stress and burnout, and 2) the new normal of education affects their work performance and environment. Using the PICOS framework (population, intervention, comparators, outcomes, and study design), the eligibility search includes the inclusion and exclusion criteria which specify the representative of the literature on those specific issues. The inclusion eligibility search criteria will include the following:
1) Mental health studies to include those psychological and mental problems of the employees and other potential factors to cause the occurrence of mental health issues;
published after year of 2017 to 2020
2) Studies examining the effects of any employee's stress, burnout and work performance with the mental health capacity to enhance the employees’ coping skills in their workplace.
3) Studies include educational development of the employees' new normal to affect their working performance.
Search Criteria
The systematic search will be conducted for journal articles on Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology, The Open Psychology Journal, RAUSP Management Journal and MBI Maslach Burnout Inventory. The search strategy is as follows, limiting the search to results which journal articles emphasizing the current highlighted issues, written in English, and published
from 2000 to 2020 are related to the following items search to include 1) mental health issues with stress, burn-out and other psychopathological consequences, 2) work performance and other coping skills of the employees.
Data Analysis
The data will be synthesized according to the methodical formulation in the surent study.
Data will be collected using search engines to formulate the synthesis of findings from multiple qualitative and quantitative studies accordingly. A narrative synthesis will be conducted to analyse qualitative data on the major findings of all the targeted studies to determine the data collection is specified under each search category. The frequency of findings will be generated to include the positive, negative, mixed or inconclusive results.
The heterogeneous studies will be classified into narrative data analysis. The search category for data collection into quantitative studies will be using a statistical meta-analysis summary.
However, due to the complexity of search identification in the current study analysis, therefore, the statistical meta-analysis procedures shall be limited to report on the possibility of statistical heterogeneity.
The qualitative synthesis however, will serve the plausible search criteria in the current study to address the reviews in a more flexible analysis to focus on the presented issues. Those studies will be classified into different categories following the determined criteria in each category to include the three different issues addressed in the search eligibility. Studies under different types of interventions, will be specified to follow each label to characterise the profound component such as strong evidence, promising evidence, initial evidence etc. (Daniels et al., 2017; Snape et al., 2017). Whereas the quantitative studies will be evaluated based on limitations in the design and results, such as the research design, unexplained heterogeneity, inconsistency of results, etc. The qualitative studies will be evaluated based on their relevance to their review questions, coherence of the review findings, and adequacy of data supporting said finding.
4. Results & Discussion
Reviewed analysis
The current systematic plans for the reviewed analysis involve numbers or Qualitative studies and the analysis is conducted based on the categorization of themes developed for the reviewed synthesis of the data collection. Reviewed synthesis is performed to moderate the validation procedures in all studied issues, categorised based on the generated themes.
Data search engines help assist in the analysis with two or more researchers involved in the current research synthesis to develop a fundamental conceptual framework for the purpose of delivering the summary of the available primary resources.The recent analysis which we found to be in the current data synthesis from the category of all reviews were mostly done as a systematic review, conceptual analysis, descriptive survey, framework analysis, theoretical model, regression analysis, experimental and empirical study analysis, as shown in table 1. Of all referred studies for the purpose of this current research, only three were identified under the specific needs of quantitative analysis. Therefore, the analysis of the current data is mainly in the qualitative procedures.
Table 1: Reviews Category And Study Design
Category Study Research Design
Depression, anxiety and acute pain:
links and management challenges
Michaelides, A., & Zis, P. (2019) Experimental study
Work, stress, coping, and stress management.
Glazer, S., & Liu, C. (2017) Conceptual paper
The contribution of stress management and good employee performance towards the success of a company.
Soegoto, E. S., & Narimawati, U.
(2017)
Descriptive Survey
Stress Management in the Modern Workplace and the Role of Human Resource Professionals.
Tran, C. T., Tran, H. T., Nguyen, H.
T., Mach, D. N., Phan, H. S., &
Mujtaba, B. G. (2020)
Empirical Study
Occupational stress and coping strategy harmony between scientific theory and islamic teachings and practice.
Benedictus, R. A. (2018) Framework analysis
Islamic work ethics, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction of islamic banks in Indonesia.
Nasution, F. N., & Rafiki, A. (2020) Descriptive and Inferential
Statistical Analysis
Stress management and employee performance.
Joy, H. (2020) Framework
Analysis
CREATIVE ARTS INTERVENTIONS FOR STRESS MANAGEMENT AND PREVENTION—A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW.
Martin, L., Oepen, R., Bauer, K., Nottensteiner, A., Mergheim, K., Gruber, H., & Koch, S. C. (2018)
Systematic Review
NewCope: A Theory-Linked mobile application for stress education and management.
Carter, L., Rogith, D., Franklin, A.,
& Myneni, S. (2019)
Framework Analysis
Stress Management. Michalewski, G., & Pietrakowski, P. (2018)
Thematic Analysis
Long-Term Effectiveness of Stress Management at Work: Effects of the Changes in Perceived Stress Reactivity on Mental Health and Sleep Problems Seven Years Later
Herr, R. M., Barrech, A., Riedel, N., Gündel, H., Angerer, P., & Li, J.
(2018)
Linear Regression
Stress Management and Organizational effectiveness.
Balamurugan, R., & Nazer, M.
(2019)
Conceptual paper
Stress Management at Workplace. Bansal, R. (2018) Empirical Study
Lazarus and Folkman’s psychological stress and coping theory. The handbook of stress and health: A guide to research and practice.
Biggs, A., Brough, P., &
Drummond, S. (2017)
Theoretical Model
Stress Management. Harshitha, M & Gopinath, M.
(2020)
Descriptive Study
Stress Management: A Study on Indian Women
Nagesg, P. .(2018) Descriptive Study
Job burnout: a general literature review Lubbadeh, T. (2020) Systematic Review
Clinical benefits of rational-emotive stress management therapy for job burnout and dysfunctional distress of special education teachers.
Onuigbo, L. N., Onyishi, C. N., &
Eseadi, C. (2020)
Empirical Study
Development of intervention for employees’ work performance
Data analysis in the current study indicates the representation of a few models described in the literature and reviewed analysis according to the design each study developed. The need for intervention plan development to further analyse the components of current generated themes developed from the fundamental conceptual framework to deliver the summary of the available primary resources. Themes which could be generated from the current models representations to include those but not limited to the educators’ mental health at the workplace, their stress, burnout affecting the work performance, and their growth and development in the new normal educational environment. We analyse the frameworks presented by the previous reviews for the proposed development of intervention of the employees’ work performance at the educational setting as shown in figure 1 below.
Figure 1: Development of Intervention Plan for Employees’ mental health and work performance analysis.
5. Conclusion
The study produced summary results in reflection amongst the educators on the stress levels during the pandemic, feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion and high degrees of emotional and physical overextension. Eighteen development of intervention for employees’ work performance as table showed categories and evolution from the year 2017 to 2021. The employees cynical, distant and callous attitude towards work as well as reduced professional efficacy. The intervention plan acknowledges various stressor in the educational setting. These stressor may come from the individual or from the environment. Individual educators come from various family and education backgrounds. These differences can result in role conflict and personality conflict. The organization environment can also contribute to the stressor, where there is imbalance and variance of workload can make an individual feel to be the victim. It can be even more upsetting if favoritism is being practiced. At certain times being a productive worker can also be a disadvantage, where organization at times overuses skilled employees. The personal and organization environment are then exposed to the individual and group impact. This can lead to distress or eustress. The positive or known as eustress brings to the wellbeing of the employee while the distress can lead to anxiety, burnout and depression.
This study hopes to support the employees’ work performance to shed light on the new normal of education in Malaysia especially in the aspect of mental health and employee’s overall performance. The intervention strategies can shed initiative that leads to mental well being, social well being, spiritual well being and psychological well being. Educators in their various roles as policy makers, administrators or the teaching staff, must be aware of the changes in the new norms. Any changes made at the various levels should only bring about a better environment for all stakeholders. After all, happy employees produce higher productivity and great human capital.
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