The Impact of Job Stress on Employee’s Performance at one of Private Banks in Egypt during COVID-19 Pandemic

Ashraf Elsafty,Lydia Shafik

doi:10.5539/ibr.v15n2p24

Abstract

Job stress is a universal element that is not only encountered in every individual but also in every organization regardless of its size. Especially, bankers who are under a good deal of stress because of the nature of their work. Stress could result in a decrease in employees&rsquo; performance, productivity, quality of labor, and high turnover rate, in addition to some health problems like anxiety, depression, and headache. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perception of employees of one of the private banks in Egypt and their performance in the presence of job stress in the uncertain period of the coronavirus pandemic. The literature review defined the job stressors which are role ambiguity, underutilization of skills, and work overload. Similar studies have been also mentioned for the impact of job stress on employees&rsquo; performance in different countries. A descriptive research design was conducted using a survey questionnaire that is distributed among the employees of the bank in all departments and the collected responses were 51 respondents that were taken from a total population of 1,100 employees. The questionnaire is divided into two parts; the demographic profile and the questions related to variables under study. Descriptive statistics are used and the study revealed that the job stressors &ldquo;role ambiguity and underutilization of skills&rdquo; has no impact on employees&rsquo; performance in the banking field in Egypt. However, it is found that work overload has an impact on employees&rsquo; performance and even more in the covid-19 era.&nbsp;

Highlights

Nowadays, with the modern lifestyle, stress became a well-known phenomenon worldwide that has a bad impact on individuals’ health as well as on their performance whether personal or professional (Madian, Abdelaziz, & Ahmed, 2019)
The only study that was conducted on the banking sector at Mansoura City in Egypt was by Salim, Wahed, Zidan, and Assad (2019) that was applied to employees working in national and private banks
The theoretical framework is developed based on the aim of the study as well as the previous literature in this area. the model was developed based on a previous study conducted by Jalagat in 2017 who examined the impact of job stress on employees’ performance of Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) in Al-Bahja Center that is shown in figure (8) (Jalagat, 2017)

Summary

Introduction

With the modern lifestyle, stress became a well-known phenomenon worldwide that has a bad impact on individuals’ health as well as on their performance whether personal or professional (Madian, Abdelaziz, & Ahmed, 2019). The health Safety Executive UK (HSE) has defined stress as the opposite reaction individual has to extreme pressure, which can result in psychological and physical ill-health (HSSE, 2001). The Health Safety Security and Environment world HSSE add that for employees to be under pressure it could have a positive or negative impact depending on whether the individual can manage the stress or not, especially when demands and pressure become excessive (Bower, 2016) ( Bashir & Ramay, 2010). Stress could result in a significant impact on the employee’s job performance (Shahid, Latif, Sohail, & Ashraf, 2010). Stress can affect employee work efficiency, employee turnover, absenteeism as well as some health problem as anxiety, depression, headache, and backache (Shahid, Latif, Sohail, & Ashraf, 2010)

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Conclusion