Job stress according to Beehr and Newman (1978) is
a condition arising from the interaction of people and their jobs,
characterized by changes within the people that force them to deviate from
their normal functioning. For our purpose, we take job or occupational stress
to refer to the reaction to the demands on the work environment such that the
individual is
unable to contend with them. Be that as it may, it needs to be
stressed, however that stress is an inevitable phenomenon experienced by
everybody in all works of life. Work related stress is of growing concern
because it has significant economic implications for organizations through
employee-dissatisfaction, lowered productivity, and lowered emotional and
physical health of the employee (Matteson and Ivancevich, 1987).
A
search of the literature reveals that researches carried out on principal
stress were conducted mostly in the developed countries like the USA (Whitaker,
1996); the U.K (Cooper, 1988) and Australia (Beeson and Matthews, 1992). The
applicability of their recommendations may not be tenable in a developing
country like Nigeria. In Nigeria, the bulk of research conducted so far had
focused exclusively on stress among university administrators (Ugoji, 1995;
Bamisaiye, 1996). Little studies had been carried out on stress among principals
of secondary schools in Nigeria.
This
background emphasizes the need to explore principal stress in the Nigerian
context more so when considered against the crucial position of the school
principal in secondary school management. This study was, therefore undertaken
to explore the occupational stress factors among secondary school principals in
Warri South Local Government Area of Delta State.
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