Happiness in IT Professionals: Does It Depend upon Organizational Role Stress or Stressful Life Events?

Abstract

Globalization and technological innovations are bringing about new challenges to the study of positive psychology. History has demonstrated that with each new technological innovation, there have been profound changes in the quality of life of human beings. From the last decade, scientific know how is being driven by the information technology (IT). Jobs in IT are the most coveted one in modem India, and the most brilliant section of the youth is going for it. While each job has its own stress, IT jobs are somewhat different from the traditional and typical concept of secured employment. IT jobs are mostly contractual with less job security but high pay, and entail strong competitiveness, along with a globalized life style. It influences work stress perception, necessary coping repertoire and overall mental health.Hence work stress is thought to affect individuals' psychological and physical health, as well as organizations' effectiveness, in an adverse manner. Many researchers focus on different areas of work stress, one of them being role stress. Pestonjee and Pareek (1997) explain role as the totality of formal tasks, informal tasks and acts as organized by an individual. Role stress refers to the conflict and tension due to the roles enacted by a person at any given point of time (Pareek, 2003). When enacted in the context of organizations, such role stress is called organizational role stress. There are different hierarchical positions and their corresponding roles in the IT organization. Different roles have an inbuilt potential for conflict and stress (Pareek, 2003).Besides work stress, stressful life events are also an important factor in everyone's life. IT professionals are not exceptional. A life event can be defined as stressful when it instigates a pattern of specific and non-specific responses on the part of the individual to different stimulus events that disturb his/her equilibrium or tax excess resources or exceed his ability tocope adaptively and thus brings about a number of stressful reactions on the part of the individual. Holmes and Rahe (1967) also included forty three life events that are likely to require some level of adaptation and would create stress, irrespective of whether the life event was positive or negative. Work stressors also sometime act as stressful life events.Overall role stress and stressful life events affect the well being of IT employees. Happiness is one of the determinants of well being. Psychologists have defined happiness in a variety of ways (Kesebir and Diener, 2008). From the hedonic view, happiness is perceived as pleasant feeling and favourable judgement of life satisfaction (assessed globally as well as in specific domains such as relationships, health, work and leisure), and affect balance, or having preponderance of positive feeling and relatively few negative feeling (Diener et al., 1990; Schimmack, 2008). From the eudaemonist view, happiness involves self-validation, self actualization and related concepts which suggest that a happy or a good life involves doing what is right and virtuous, going, pursuing important or self-concordant goals, and using and developing one's skills and talents, regardless of how one may actually feel at any point in time (Seligman, 2002). In the modem life, human being exists due to hedonic happiness but it is unsustainable over the long term in the absence of eudaemonic well being.So, in this study, researchers want to compare happy and unhappy IT professionals in terms of perception of stressful life events and role stress.MethodParticipantsThe samples of the present study were 100 male married individuals. The age range was 28-32 years. The education of the subjects was B.Tech level. All the subjects were Hindu and all of them were male and employed in IT sectors as software engineer. All of them were part of nuclear families residing in urban areas, and were not suffering from any significant physical or psychiatric illness. …