Does Stress affect Work Performance Poster-1-218qmbt
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Owen Sinderman, Undecided, from Seattle WA
Writing is something I have always had an interesting relationship with. On one hand I love writing in an informal setting regarding topics that I enjoy. In situations like this I can go on and on, the words naturally flowing from my mind to the medium on which I am communicating. On the other hand, writing in a setting such as school, in which my writing is judged and graded causes me to lock up and not be able to get anything down. Over the past several weeks in English 101 I feel as though I have developed more confidence in my work in such a setting through better understanding writing expectations and nuances.
A field in which I feel I have always struggled as a writer is in paragraph structure and flow. They are things that consistently trip me up as I am writing and break my flow as I worry about the very nature of that which I am writing in regards to how well it will be received. Structure of paragraphs I feel is something I will need to continue to work on but in regards to flow I feel as though this class has allowed me to improve greatly through things like Project 1.
It may seem obvious, but as a writer I always feel most at ease writing about things with which I hold experience. It enables my preferred method of writing – that being flow of conscious and lets me not worry too much about whether or not the product is “good enough.” This has not changed much in this class as the subject of my group work was stress, something I am all too familiar with. Something that this class has opened me up to, to a degree is the use of sources. I used to look at sources as just something I had to add to claims I was making in order to back them up but I have gained a new perspective on them as primarily sources of information with which to form opinions and claims. I am personally quite proud of the work I have done this quarter regarding collection and usage of scholarly sources such as journal articles and research findings as someone who has never been too keen on that kind of thing.
In the future I hope to be able to apply the things I have taken from this class, primarily in the fields of paragraph flow/connection and use of/finding of sources to inform papers I write. I am glad to have been able to come into this class with next to no expectations and come out pleasantly surprised with what I was able to get out of the experience.
Over the course of the projects in this class my partner and I have been researching the effects of stress, particularly as it pertains to ability to perform in settings of work. Our webtext seeks to inform the prospective reader of our findings and educate them as to how they can use the information in their lives. It can be found here: https://wp.wwu.edu/mgosresearchweb/
Marcos Gonzalez, Math Major, from Burlington WA
Prior starting English 101 I was not much of a reader, writer or a just an English type of person in any way sorts. I was very much into math in high school and I even hated writing reports for math as well. What really encouraged that was that I am dyslexic, and it makes hard for me to read and so I don’t really like doing something that is hard for me to do and overcome. So, coming into English which was also a required class I wasn’t too happy for it.
However, the first project talking about the literary sponsorship narrative kind of inspired me to write more. For me the project was a way to invited nostalgia into my life. So, it inspired me to write for a bit of time. But it was short lived as I just didn’t have much to go on. I was able to get project 1 and 2 done. But I felt I had to export something that wasn’t me.
Then the start of the research project came to life. I was partnered with Owen Sinderman and it was kind of relaxing as we had worked on Project 2 together, so we knew of our work schedules and didn’t need to figure each other out. I also saw immediate interest in this project as it was an opportunity to go into research math type of writing.
As the project was going on I really got to experience how statistics type majors did their research and how they write their papers. For me it was kind of rough as doing the usual statistics and then doing other things such as sources and updates just became a lot of work to do. But I also discovered the importance of sources as the sources provided a sort of incite into what I was doing. It was like a guideline for what to do and provided more possible things I could do with my research direction. After looking at a four or so sources I began to really like doing research papers for math because it was cool seeing what other professors were capable of and I’m static to show people what I can do. It encourages me to proceed with my major and it also provides a bit of comfort for me because I’m more confident to these research papers because I’m having more experience in them.
I will happy to show our research project to the public as it discusses what effects stress has on work performance. Here is our Web text: https://wp.wwu.edu/mgosresearchweb/
Project 7 – Owen Sinderman
~Prompt 1~
Our research topic was stress and how it interacts with the way that people are able to complete work, as well as workload’s effect on stress. In our research, we surveyed 40 people on this topic and found clear correlations linking high amounts of stress with a high workload, and a significant majority of participants stating an increase in difficulty regarding completion of work while under large amounts of stress. This lines up with research from other sources that we’ve found (all sources listed on poster) creating a definite tie between high amounts of work and difficulty completing work. This information is relevant and important for a variety of groups, including teachers, students, as well as those in charge of employees.
From our results I believe that teachers should try to more actively be conscious of the amount of work that they assign, as especially at Western with the shorter classes in the quarter system lots of assignments can stack up really fast leading to high amounts of stress among students leading to high amounts of difficulty completing work. It ought to be in the best interest of those providing education to make sure that the students are able to participate in learning and drowning them in work ultimately makes everything worse for everyone involved.
This responsibility isn’t only on those responsible for teaching however, as something can be said for students as well. Given our findings students should be wary of taking on too much work, especially those with jobs. Taking too many work-heavy classes can result in difficulty completing work for all classes due to the stress that would come from such an undergoing. Those with jobs need to balance that separate workload as well, as losing time to complete schoolwork can lead to a pileup of things to do which will cause stress and make things even harder.
Speaking of jobs, there’s something to be said for the validity of our findings in a work environment that those in charge of managing employees could serve to understand. Simply, overworked employees will produce lower-quality or slower work than they would given a smaller workload making things more difficult for both parties.
With all this said, everyone has a different amount of work that they would consider to be “too much” before they start getting very stressed so there is no perfect solution. At the end of the day, the most important thing to take from our research is to be fair to yourself and those who you are responsible for regarding workload, as it can snowball out of one’s control fairly easily given enough of it.
Stress Coping Methods Analysis
- Pierceall, Emily A., and Marybelle C. Keim. “Stress and Coping Strategies Among Community College Students.” Community College Journal of Research and Practice, vol. 31, no. 9, 2007, pp. 703–712., doi:10.1080/10668920600866579.
- This source investigates specifically the coping strategies used by those experiencing stress. It gathers information from 212 students through use of the Perceived Stress Scale. It argues that institutions should make it a priority to prevent stress. Among the results found were that talking to family and friends, leisure activities, and exercising were the most common methods of stress management.
- Quotes:
- “today millions of Americans including college students may be affected dramatically by stress.”
- “stress can interfere with students’ concentration and their ability to learn. However, on the other hand, some stress that students experience can be helpful and stimulating.”
- I feel as though this source is useful in our research because it provides insight into common stress management methods as well as the stress levels of those displaying said methods. This ties into our research of effects of stress on work ability of college students by allowing us to better understand where it’s coming from.
Sources of Stress Among College Students Analysis
- ROSS, SHANNON E., et al. “SOURCES OF STRESS AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS.” College Student Journal, vol. 33, no. 2, 1999, p. 312. Academic OneFile, https://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A62839434/AONE?u=googlescholar&sid=AONE&xid=3fb1aac9. Accessed 19 Feb. 2019.
- The purpose of this source is “to determine what sources of stress are the most prevalent among college students, and to examine the nature of these stressors.” This source uses information gathered from a 40 question survey distributed among 100 college students. The article argues that stress does not come from the source of stress, but rather from the interaction between the person experiencing said stress and the perception of the source of it. It also discusses how these sources are often amplified among college students, especially freshmen. Notably, the most common sources of stress found among college students were those of the intrapersonal variety, such as changes in food and financial habits.
- Quotes:
- “The top five sources of stress were; change in sleeping habits, vacations/breaks, change in eating habits, increased work load, and new responsibilities.”
- “College students, especially freshmen, are a group particularly prone to stress”
- “It is important that stress intervention programs be designed to address stress of college students. “
- I think that this article could be useful in our research because it provides good insight into the causes of stress among the primary age group of subjects of our study. In addition to this the article just generally provides a large amount of insight into the nature of stress and how it affects those experiencing it.
Work-Family Conflict Analysis
The article starts off giving definitions and some background information on some topics that will be frequently referenced. The do this by using a various number of sources that are consistent with each other on the definitions that they use. They go on to state that a lot of studies have very differing results to what they want they study. Some studies say that work-family conflict have a negative influence on work performance and some say that work-family conflict have a positive influence on work performance. Work-family and job satisfaction, work-stress and performance etc. Then they again a lot of sources to start forming a hypothesis based on other articles.
They begin to research by deciding to use women who are married as their test subjects. They take surveys from them using quantitative data such as scales of 1-5. To also encourage people to take the survey it was done more in an interview fashion so should any misinterpretation arrives they will be there to guide them to if they have any questions. “For increasing the responses rate, the data were also collected through interviewing to guidance the respondents lowering falsehood on fill out the questionnaire.” They then after collecting 46 samples they use statistical analysis finding consistent and strong results. In the end they show that we should increase job satisfaction, so we can decrease work stress, so it won’t negatively influence employee performance. They then begin to say how can we apply this data saying that we should be focusing on decreasing job family conflict and that managers should again keep touch with their employees so that they can see more results from their employees.
How can I apply this? Well it’s again another variable that I should’ve considered. But I feel that it could’ve been lack luster as there would’ve been a lot of things to go in depth into and could’ve led to inconsistent results. But more importantly I think in our poster we should be striving to use as many sources as the authors used. You can pick any paragraph and 75% (I don’t know it’s just a big number) of the time you can find at least one source. It just makes them seem more believable than just “Hey I’m taking this data. Here are my results.” It also feels like it makes everything seem more consistent with each other. Finally, it shows that they trying to find the truth and not what they think is consistent as they even cited and opening said that “These studies are contradictory, and they want to find why is it contradictory?” Overall, I just want to find more sources so that I can build a consistent case for my study.
Riana, I.Gede, et al. “Managing Work-Family Conflict and Work Stress through Job Satisfaction and Its Impact on Employee Performance.” Jurnal Teknik Industri, vol. 20, no. 2, Dec. 2018, pp. 127–134. EBSCOhost, doi:10.9744/jti.20.2.127-134
Stress and Nurses Analysis
The article provided background information that nurses work great under heavy pressure and then goes on to say that stress may affect dissatisfaction, burnout, and poor performance. They then state that there are plenty of studies to show that there is a negative relationship between stress and job performance. So higher stress levels will lead to a lower job performance. But they were also studies to show that the relationship was positive. So, they begin to question what was causing this to happen? “U-shaped relationship or a positive relationship between work stress and job performance asserted that a possible explanation for these inconsistent results might be existing variables to moderate the effect of stress on performance.” They come to find Folkman’s study that showed that coping can reduce stress. Therefore, they come to the question of what effects does coping have on stress and job performance?
They decided to give out surveys to nurses in Heilongjiang Province, China asking questions like with methods of coping they use (positive coping methods and negative coping methods), how much stress they have, how much they perform and various sub questions to those questions. They then take their results and use statistical analysis to determine what relationships were strong and what were not. They concluded that negative coping methods determined workload, job performance, and various other things and positive coping methods determined patient care and job performance. Importantly for our sake positive and negative coping methods both affected job performance. “We also found that coping strategies had moderating effects on some of the work stress subscales and job performance. Negative coping methods affected job performance negatively and positive coping methods affected job performance positively. “In addition, positive coping strategies were positively correlated with job performance and negative coping strategies were negatively correlated with job performance.
How can I apply this? Well I can’t so much apply this into my study, but it is a something to look out for when coming to our conclusion. We didn’t take coping mechanisms into account so should we see any inconsistency’s it could well be that our subjects use various coping methods. From table 2 we find that positive coping methods were used more but they were roughly the same. So, should we see results from some data points that are inconsistent with others we will take those out and consider it as possible different coping mechanisms. We will still address it, but we will handle the situation when it comes.
Li Li, et al. “Moderating Effects of Coping on Work Stress and Job Performance for Nurses in Tertiary Hospitals: A Cross-Sectional Survey in China.” BMC Health Services Research, vol. 17, June 2017, pp. 1–8. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1186/s12913-017-2348-3.