A social work study using factor analysis on detecting important factors creating stress : A case study of hydro-power employees

Article history: Received December 15, 2011 Received in Revised form February, 14, 2011 Accepted 24 March 2012 Available online March 29 2012 The study performs an empirical study based on the implementation of factor analysis to detect different factors influencing people to have more stress in a hydropower unit located in city of Esfahan, Iran. The study performed the survey among all 81 people who were working for customer service section of this company and consisted of two parts, in the first part; we gather all private information such as age, gender, education, job experience, etc. through seven important questions. In the second part of the survey, there were 66 questions, which included all the relevant factors impacting employees' stress. Cronbach alpha was calculated as 0.946, which is well above the minimum acceptable level. The implementation of factor analysis has detected 16 important groups of factors and each factor is determined by an appropriate name. The results of our factor analysis show that among different factors, difficulty of working condition as well as work pressure are two most important factors increasing stress among employees. © 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
Stress is one of the most harmful factors, which not only impacts undesirable social relationships among workers in a firm but also it could harm people's health care.There are many conditions where the creation of stress among employees is unavoidable and people must find suitable ways to handle stress, properly.Nevertheless, understanding the nature and root of stress in organizations helps us reduce its impact using appropriate methods (Watson et al., 2011;Çekmecelioğlu & Günsel, 2011).In fact, for many years, there were significant efforts on learning how it is possible to reduce stress among employees (Bassett et al., 1987;Law et al., 1995).Gupta and Beehr (1979) studied the relationship between job stress and employee behaviors by investigating the relationship between four job stresses and two employee withdrawal behaviors including absenteeism and turnover.They concluded that prediction of subsequent behaviors was stronger than prediction of prior behaviors, and explained that the predictive power of job stress and background variables taken together was, at least, as powerful as the predictive power of background variables alone.Smith et al. (1992) studied critical job design elements, which influenced worker stress responses in an electronic monitoring context.The results of their survey indicated that employees who had their performance electronically monitored perceived their working conditions as more stressful, and reported higher levels of job boredom, psychological tension, anxiety, depression, anger, health complaints and fatigue.Slate and Vogel (1997) performed another study on the perceived atmosphere for participation in correctional decision making and its impact on employee stress and thoughts about quitting.They reported that as employee participation increased, physical and occupational stress decreased.
de Ruyter et al. (2001) performed a survey on the role of stress in call centers in terms of performance or job satisfaction.They explained that specifically the autonomy dimension of empowerment had a role-stress-reducing impact.Interesting substantive direct positive impacts of empowerment competence and leadership consideration on job satisfaction were also considered.Job satisfaction was found to be conducive to job performance.Besides, the study revealed that job satisfaction could reduce turnover intentions, directly or indirectly via organizational commitment.Vearing and Mak (2007) performed another study on the joint influence of the big five personality factors and an extended model of work stress based on study on effort-reward imbalance (ERI), on employees' depressive symptoms.They explained an association between neuroticism (N) and OVC.Kim et al. (2009) investigated the moderating roles of organization level and gender in the relationship between job satisfaction and role stress for hotel employees.The study includes measures of job satisfaction, role stress in terms of both conflict and ambiguity and demographic data was implemented to collect information from hotel employees in Republic of Korea.The results indicated that the impact of role stress on job satisfaction is substantially stronger for female employees and supervisory employees than male and non-supervisory workers.Saastamoinen et al. (2009) examined the own and independent relationships of job strain, workplace bullying, organizational justice and work-home interface with pain.Among women, all psychosocial factors were considered for both acute and chronic pain when adjusted for confounders only.Among men, when adjusted for confounders only, all psychosocial factors were associated with acute and chronic pain, except for family-to-work conflicts among those with acute pain.Chiang et al. (2010) studied the moderating impacts of job control and work-life balance practices on employee stress in the hotel and catering industry.The results of this survey described that high job demands coupled with low job control and the availability of work-life balance practices leads in a higher level of stress.Tabatabaei et al. (2011) studied the general health, stress associated to the work and job satisfaction of the Hormozgan Cement Factory employees.The study was semi-experimental with the pre-test and post-test without control group and to improve mental health of employees, psychological trainings and motivational models were executed.The results demonstrated that general health and job satisfaction of employees were higher than average (α = 0.01) but their job stress was lower than average (α = 0.01).After intervention, results disclosed improvement of job stress and such trainings and models recommended for improvement of employees stress.Coelho et al. (2011) performed a survey on the mediating impacts of role stress and intrinsic motivation using contextual factors and the creativity of frontline employees.They reported that the creativity of frontline service employees is associated positively with role conflict and negatively with role ambiguity.Costa et al. (2011) performed confirmatory factor analysis of posttraumatic stress symptoms in Brazilian primary care patients using an examination of seven alternative models.Their objective was to study whether the clusters of PTSD symptoms identified in North American and European studies could be replicated in a Brazilian sample composed of 805 primary care patients living in hillside slums.They reported that their results seemed to uphold the cross-cultural validity of the 4-factor, first-order model.
The present study investigates to find out the important factors influencing job stress in one of Iranian hydro facilities.The structure of this study first explains characteristics of all people who participated in our survey.

The proposed study
The study investigates different factors influencing people to have more stress in a hydropower unit located in city of Esfahan, Iran.Since there were only 81 people working for customer service section of this company and the proposed study tries to focus only on this part of the firm we have decided to distribute questionnaires among all of them.The questionnaire consists of two parts, in the first part, we gather all private information such as age, gender, education, job experience, etc. through seven important questions.In the second part of the survey, there are 52 questions, which include all the important factors influencing employees' stress.

Personal characteristics of surveyed people
As we explained, there are 81 people participated in our survey.In terms of their gender, there were 73 male and 8 female so approximately 90% of the surveyed people are from man.In terms of their educational background, 10 people had only 9 years of educational background, 48 people finished high school and 23 people had colleague education.While 15 people were single, 66 people were married.In terms of employment type, 21 people were permanent employee, 11 people maintained a five-year contract, 44 people had one-year contract and only 5 employee were on temporary contract.
In terms of job experience, 20 people aged between 20-29, 36 people aged between 30-39, 15 people were between 40 to 49 and finally, 10 employees were over 50 years of age.In terms of job experience, 45 people has from one to ten years of job experience, 15 people had between 11 to 20 years of job experiences and 21 people has between 21 to 30 years of job experience.Finally, 23 people were regular employee, 14 were workers, 30 people were working in customer service and 14 people were hired as accountants.

Methodology
In this survey, we use factor analysis to cluster different factors influencing stress.As usual, we use only factors whose Eigenvalues are greater than one.Therefore, we eliminate any remaining factors with small Eigenvalues.Next, we present details of our 66 questions along with common factors associated with each factor.

Third factor: Stress posed by managers and colleagues
This factor includes only five items including 39 (0.678), 45 (0.877), 48 (0.804), 61 (0.478) and 62 (0472) and we can conclude that this factor represents stress posed by managers and colleagues.

Seventh factor: Stress posed by boring operations high expectations
When there is no change on work and workers are expected highly they may feel stress and this is recognized by item 19 (0.585), 21 (0.537) and 43 (0.796).

Eighth factor: Stress posed by blaming for no good reason
This item is another important factor, which includes only item 24 (0.792) and we call it blaming for no good reason.
3.9 Ninth factor: Stress created by pressure posed from various divisions and lack of good human relationships This item is another important factor, which includes four items, which are 12 (0.450), 38 (0.777) and 40 (0.482) and we call it stress created by pressure posed from various divisions and lack of good human relationships.

Tenth factor: Stress posed by lack of job security
This factor is detected within two factors of 13 (0.603) and 58 (0.761), which implies that job security plays an important role on stress.

Eleventh factor: Stress posed by lack of good outlook for job
This factor is detected within two factors of 29 (0.448) and 44 (0.613), which implies that a good outlook for job can reduce the bad impact of stress.
3.12 Twelfth factor: Stress posed by too much job exchange and lack of a good performance measurement This factor is determined within two factors of 46 (0.729) and 65 (0.648), which implies that the lack of a performance measurement could increase stress among workers.

Thirteenth factor: Stress posed by lack of a good regulation for tasks
This item is another important factor, which includes only item 59 (0.650), which represents for lack of a good regulation for tasks assigned to workers.

Fourteenth factor: Stress posed by the fear of arriving on time
This factor is determined within two factors of 3 (0.805) and 53 (0.455), which implies that workers may feel bad for being late at work.

Fifteenth factor: Stress posed by lack of a good perception of job
This item is another important factor, which includes only item 33 (0.687), which represents for lack of a good perception for tasks assigned to workers.

Sixteenth factor: Stress posed by job location
This item is another important factor, which includes only item 20 (0.666), which is associated with job location.
In summary, the results of Factor analysis using principal component analysis can help us detect all important issues creating stress among workers.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented an empirical study to investigate different factors influencing people to have more stress in a hydropower unit located in city of Esfahan, Iran.Since there were only 81 people working for customer service section of this company and the proposed study tries to focus only on this part of the firm we have decided to distribute questionnaires among all of them.The results of our factor analysis indicated that among different factors, difficulty of working condition as well as work pressure are two most important factors increasing stress among employees.

Table 1
Details of survey

Table 2
The results of principal component analysis (PCA)