The Impact of Occupational Stress on University Employees’ Personality

This study is an effort to understand the impact of occupational stress which is classified into four constructs i.e. pressure at work, support at work, job satisfaction, and nature of job, on the personality of employees working in public as well as private sector universities. To conduct the study, a survey questionnaire was floated to six universities: two public sector and four private sector. These universities were selected on convenience bases and respondents from these universities were selected based on purposive sampling technique. The data was found reliable through cronbach alpha. In order to analyse data, correlation followed by multiple regression were applied as statistical tools. Analysis showed that all variables of occupational stress have significant impact over employees’ personality and overall model is significant at 99.9% confidence interval.

Furthermore the work productivity is affected by how individuals process and perceive information. It is generally perceived that women are more emotional than their male counterpart and hence are more prone to stress. The objective of this study was to analyse the effect of occupational stress on employee's personality by focussing on university's employees in the public and private sector. To carry out this study, the teaching and not teaching staff constituted the respondents of this study. These departments included business, fashion and engineering. A close-ended questionnaire was used to gather responses from employees working in those identified departments. The questionnaire focused on five dimensions which were employee personality, pressure at work, support at work, job satisfaction and nature of job. Thus, this research will try to answer the following research question: How does occupational stress influence on employees' personality working at academia?
The following hypotheses are extracted from the research question and the given literature review: H1: There is a significant influence of pressure at work on employees' personality. Ahmad, Ashraf H2: There is a significant impact of support at work on employees' personality.
H3: There is a significant impact of job satisfaction on employees' personality.
H4: there is a significant influence of Nature of Job on Employees'

Occupational stress
Stress can either be positive or negative. Not all stresses are negative. Some level of stress is necessary for development, motivation, changes for growth of the employees and the organization (Ellis, 2006). Stress in the workplace is a source of contention for organizations and employees. Gender also plays a significant role in the level of stress at work aswomen experience higher level of stress as compare to the men. Due to this, the females cannot perform multiple roles thus affecting their progress (Gyllensten & Stephen, 2005).
Work-related stress was once associated with senior positions on the organizational hierarchy, but now it is acknowledged that it is for employees at all levels (Beheshtifar, Malikeh, Nazarian, & Rahele, 2013).
Scholars placedemphasis and showed their concern regarding occupational stress. Stress at work has been considered as important as work performance or financial security of a firm. It is assumed dthat work place can prove to be a source of stress for individuals (Vokiae & Bogdanie, 2008).
Job stress is harmful physically and emotionally for the employee. When jobs do not match the capability and potential of employees, it results in a negative impact. It creates job stress for employees which results in repercussions on the employee's health.
High level job stress among employees results in a negative impact on the organization and employee satisfaction (Rehman, 2008 Occupational stress is a serious health concerns in today's world (Lu, et al., 2003). In more recent times, occupational stress has become a topic of great interest for applied research in psychology, social sciences and medical sciences (Cooper & Payne, 1988). Steers (1981) observe that occupational stress has become an interesting topic for study of organizational behavior for the following reasons: 1. Stress has harmful psychological as well as physiological effects on individuals at the work place 2. Stress contributes as a major cause of employee turnover and therefore the study has developed hypotheses assuming persnality as dependent variable.
Employee personality and its traits has been a well-researched topic. For example, a recent study has found that the character strength as personality trait can be improved through training of employees to mitigate the negative work related behaviours (Harzer & Ruch, 2015). The work load sources and perceived workload can be moderated by personality traits (Chiorri, Garbarino, Bracco, & Magnavita, 2015). The leadership personality traits (neuroticism and conscientiousness) among mangers or the individuals having leadership role in any working environment can infuse stress among subordinates (Robertson , Healey, Hodgkinson, Flint-Taylor, & Jones, 2014). The employees' physiological reaction to the work related stress among armed forces has been studied and found work relation, organization culture at pressure at work are strong predictors of stress (Nekoranec & Kmošena, 2015). The increasing awareness about work related stress and its coping strategies have necessitated to the world health organization to develop a report in this regard (Houtman & Jettinghoff , 2007). In South African Ahmad, Ashraf perspective the pressure at work and occupational stress among black teachers has been studied and found the time pressure, student misbehaviour, and administrative issues as strong predictors of personality of teachers (Ngidi & Sibaya, 2002). In Pakistani perspective Tahseen (2015) has documented dearth of medical allowances, excessive paper work, unavialibility of internet access as strong predictors of work related stress among teachers.
However this study does not cover the aspect pressure at work among university teachers; therefore, we have formulated the following hypothesis: H1: There is significant influence of pressure at work on employees' personality Employee personality and support at work Every physical being in the working environment has a tale to tell. The employees' tale oftenappended with cues and clues showed want ofsupport at work. In Pakistan the perceived organizational support has been studied as moderating variable between teachers' affective well-being and occupational stress (Malik & Noreen, 2015), although this study has covered the cognitive domain of affective well-being however, it does not focus on support at work and employee personality. The work related stress among teachers may be strongly felt if the support at work is denied; however it may not so much impact on the employees working in administrative positions in higher education institutions (Sabherwal, Ahuja, George, & Handa, 2015). The rich empirical evidences have covered the perceived organizational support as predictor of work related stress; however there is still lacking of empirical evidences about support at work and employee personality among employees in university; thus we have formulated following hypothesis to test: H2: There is significant impact of support at work on employees' personality

Employee personality and job satisfaction
Job satisfaction is the factor which has been studied with almost every aspect of human resources practice. This has necessitated us to include this research construct as the variable of interest for this study. The association between occupational stress and job satisfaction has been studied and it was found the occupational stress is significantly associated with job satisfaction level of educators in Malaysia (Yaacob & Long , 2015). The occupational stress among secondary school teachers of Tigary Region was studied and found administration and parent relationship was strong predictor of occupational stress (Gebrekirstos, 2015).
Among personality traits the experience to openness and extraversion was studied as significantly associated with job satisfaction level among bakers (Ijaz & Khan, 2015). Realizing the significance of job satisfaction and its reflection on personality traits we have formulated following hypothesis: H3: There is significant impact of job satisfaction on employees' personality.

Nature of job and employee personality
Personality traits and its allied reactions often signify the influence of human relations; working environment; pressure at work and nature of the job. This rationality caused us to empirically investigate the nature of job and employee personality nexus.

Ahmad, Ashraf
Workload, training and denial of monetary benefits significantly predicted the occupational stress among bankers (Aliya, Maiya, Farah, & Hina, 2015). The attitude and personality in the working environment always contribute more than the anticipation of the organization. An individual in working environment through his/her personality often describe the nature of the job s/he performing, thus nature of job is strong predictor of employee personality. Surprisingly this important aspect of employee exhibition has yet not won the attention of the academic and professional scholars. Therefore we have formulated following hypothesis: H4: there is significant influence of Nature of Job on Employees' Personality.

Conceptual Framework
The model of the study is going to establish a relationship between Independent and Dependent variables as depicted graphically:

Research Methodology
The data for this study were collected by using survey method; hence the primary data collection source has been applied. The collected responses were transformed using data screening approach to eliminate outliers; and the treatment for missing responses. A

Results and Discussion
For conducting reliability test to investigate internal consistency among items cronbach's alpha reliability test through SPSS 20 was performed the results are depicted in Table 1 The above table shows the output of the reliability test using SPSS. The Cronbach's Alpha indicates the reliability of the study data. Reliability is based on inter item correlation so higher the correlation better the internal consistency of a construct.
The cut-off for Cronbach's Alpha is 0.6. Here, pressure at work (PW) has substantially higher value whereas rest of the constructs; stress at work (SW), job satisfaction (JS), nature of job(NJ) and employee personality(EP) are having closer to the bench mark. Occupational stress (OS), which is the combination of PW, SW, JS, and NJ is also having a reasonable coefficient for reliability.
In table 2, all constructs have more than 1 average score as 1 is the middle score on likert scale -2 to 3 excluding zero. Moreover, all variables have slightly negative skewness which is close to zero followed by excess kurtosis which is close to zero and that fulfil the assumption of normality.
Correlation analysis was conducted to assess association among the study variables. Its main objective is to test the strength of association between the variables.
The correlation table shows that employees' personality (dependent variable) has a positive and significant association with all the independent variables that is pressure at work, stress at work, job satisfaction, and nature of job. They all are significant at 99% confidence interval as sig value is less than 0.01 for all variables.
Overall correlation of the model is 54.2% which is quite reasonable. The model observes 28% explanatory power that is goodness of fit as shown by adjusted R square. Moreover, the difference between R square and adjusted R square is less than 5%, which depicts that there is no sample error. Table 5 shows two results; one is overall regression model is significant at 1% level of significance, and second is goodness of fit or explanatory power of the model is significant as F-statistics is greater than -4 cut-off for F which is further endorsed by sig value which is less than 0.01. PW=Pressure at work as a predictor of employee personality.

SW=Stress at work as an independent variable.
NJ=Nature of job as an stimulus variable JS= Job satisfaction as an explanatory variable.
Based on 95% confidence interval, pressure at work, support at work, and nature of job are significant constructs whereas job satisfaction is insignificant one.

Discussion
Occupational stress among employees is an important concern from the perspective of employee performance in the workplace. The interpretation of the research conducted, explains the constructs effecting employees personality that might be similar to the studies conducted previously on the same subject.
Prior researches have focussed on variables such as pressure at work, stress at work, job satisfaction, and nature of job. The current study reveals that pressure at work does influence an employee's and their perception of theirability to cope up with these demands.
High demands following by greater coping perceptions lead an individual to lesser stress (Lazarus &Folkman, 1984).Some moderators of stress that help in reducing it include developing coping skills, social support, individual differences such as good self-esteem, resilience, hardiness and personal control, along with generally well known physiological release mechanisms such as exercise (Carson, 1998;Collins, 2007).
The personality of an employee is always affected by variables such as pressure at work, job satisfaction, support at work and nature of job. Employees are a valuable asset for any business entity as their productivity helps organizations attain their goals.
Flexibility in an employee's personality proves to be fruitful for and education to such children. Furthermore, child care subsidies play a pivotal role in the developing a positive work approach in the mindsets of parent employees which improves their work efficiency and productivity (Adams & Rohacek, 2002).

Conclusion
Occupational stress among employees is an important concern from the perspective of employee performance in the workplace. It is difficult to explain the factors affecting an employee's personality directly or indirectly. This research, explains the constructs affecting employees personality that might be in support of the studies conducted before on the same subject. Many researches have focussed on the same variables that arepressure at work, stress at work, job satisfaction, and nature of job. As hypotheses of our research states, our research depicts that Pressure at work does influence employees' personality which results in high occupational stress at the workplace.

Limitations
This study encountered some limitations.Further research in the field is suggested. There is ground for future research pertaining The current study exhibits limitations that should be considered for future studies. There are other variables that influence occupational stress that affect employees' personality. The current model is not designed to include all the possible factors influencing the effect of occupational stress on employees. The results of this study was based on the study of six universities, therefore the it has limited generalization.