Paper Example on Organizational Stress: Examining Effects and Bar Graph Analysis

Introduction

This study was conducted to determine the effects of stress in an organization and find out what various organizations do to control stress among employees. Sixty questionnaires were used in this study to collect data among business employees in New York City. This paper contains a list of data collected during the study, analysis of the data collected, scientific and social applications of bar graph as a statistical technique, the historical development of the bar graphs, and the relationship of bar graphs to other topics in statistics. It then wraps up with a concise conclusion and then a list of works cited.

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A List of the Data Collected

The data collected were grouped into three different categories based on the following characteristics: Type of employee from which the data was collected, areas of job performance that are affected by stress, and programs used by employers to control stress among employees. These are showed below.Type of employee

Full-time employees only were considered in this study with age ranging from less than twenty years to sixty years or above. The following are the breakdown due to stress reported by employees from different age groups. There were 2.1% for employees under age 20, 33.7% between age 20 and 29, 29.4% for employees between 30 and 39, 26.1% between ages 40 and 49, 5.4% between 50 and 59, and 3.3% for the age of 60 and above.

Areas of work performance affected by stress

Fifteen areas of performance at work were identified to be highly affected by stress and percentages of employees affected in these areas are as follows.

Productivity 42%, cooperation 49%, employee morale 73%, initiative 44%, decision making 40%, reliability 25%, accuracy at work 53%, alertness at work 41%, creativity 53%, perseverance at work 34%, attention to physical appearance 28%, tardiness 26%, organizational skills 46%, absenteeism 26%, and courtesy 65%.

Programs provided by employers to control employee stress

Ten programs were listed, and employees asked to choose those which their employers use to manage stress in their organizations. The following data was generated from their responses.

Stress management program Responses in percentages

• Access for persons with disability 55
• Work breaks 72
• Wellness programs 30
• Reimbursement 45
• Financial counseling 10
• Employee empowerment programs 20
• Employee training programs 80
• On-site childcare 46
• Insurance 60
• Alternate schedule 43

Data Analysis

Stress at the workplace was found to be lowest among employees aged 20 and below. According to this study, employees aged between 20 and 29 are the most affected by stress at work, followed by those aged between 30 and 39. However, the trend of the negative effects of stress at work decreases with the increase in age of the employees (Trivellas et al. 34). For that reason, business employees aged 60 and above have a very low occurrence of stress at the workplace as compared to the younger ages with the exception of those aged 20 and below. The results of the study are as shown in the bar graph below.

The areas of work performance affected by stress are as presented in the bar graph below. From the graph, we can deduce that employee stress has the greatest negative effect on the morale of the employees (Trivellas et al. 24). Therefore, a workplace where employees are stressed is most likely to succumb to failures due to high levels of employee morale which not only affect their work performance but also sets up a negative attitude towards work. Stress has the least negative effect on employee absenteeism and tardiness. However, the presence of stress among employees at the workplace produces the same negative effects on both creativity and courtesy among employees. The results are as shown in the figure below.

Programs provided by employers to control employee stress include providing an alternate schedule for employees, insurance, on-site child care, employee training programs, employee empowerment programs, financial counseling, reimbursement programs, wellness programs, work breaks, and access for persons with disability. Among the above-mentioned employee stress management programs, employee training is the most used stress management program in most business organizations. Employees' stress might be as a result of inadequate experience or skills at performing tasks in an organization (Trivellas et al. 34). Effective training for employees helps in boosting their skills and enables them to perform their tasks adequately. That is the reason why most employers nowadays invest a lot of their resources into employee training to improve productivity and skills and experience of these employees. Providing employees with insurance cover also produce remarkable relief from stress that might result from medical expenses (Garg et al. 16). The employees are rescued from such stress when the employer organizations provide them with medical cover to cater for their medical care (Trivellas et al. 34). As a result, employees can be able to settle at their workplace and perform their tasks as required. Below is the representation of various stress management programs used by employer organizations to control stress among employees in their business organizations (Garg et al. 12).

Scientific and Social Applications of Bar Graphs

Bar graphs have a variety of uses in numerous scientific and social fields such as research to display data collected in a very clear way that is easy to read and understand. Bar graphs are applied extensively in representing business data and in the analysis of various business transactions. Bar graphs represent data in a way that is very conspicuous, and the trend can be easily realized (Evans et al. 23). Their simplicity in representation and ability to gain visual impression makes them widely used in many different fields of science and technology. Bar graphs are used in representing scientific experiments in laboratories in such scientific courses as biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, among many others. Bar graphs provide an excellent pictorial representation of complex data in a very simplified and easy-to-understand version. It is also applied in social sciences such as psychology, sociology, anthropology, among another field of social sciences. In business, bar graphs are used to show trends in sales or profits a firm makes during a given period of time (Taher et al. 22). In education, bar graphs are used to represent data in mathematics.

Historical Development of Bar Graphs

William Playfair is believed to be the inventor of bar graphs. Since its invention, the chart has been very beneficial to scientists, researchers, teachers, students, among many others in learning and studying various data of their concern. Given its simplicity, bar charts were used way back in the 14th century by Nicole Oresme in studying the velocity of objects. Joseph Priestley used bar charts in 1965 to publish a timeline type graph. William Playfair used bar charts in most of his publications to represent imports and exports of Scotland. Today, bar graphs have a wide range of applications in almost all fields of business and science (Evans et al. 13).

Relationship of Bar Graphs to Other Topics in the Course

There are other statistical techniques used to represent data such as line graphs, pie charts, scatter graphs, among others. Bar graphs represent data just as other statistical techniques do but in a very clear and easy manner. Unlike pie charts, bar graphs represent data in projected bars which shows clearly the extent of each data being measured. Therefore, it is easy to read and understand (Taher et al. 22).

Conclusion

Bar graphs are very good and easy to use a statistical technique that represents the data in a simple and clear manner. Bar graphs are easy to read and understand. Therefore, they have a wide range of uses in almost all fields including science, research, and education, among others (Joos et al. 14), apart from its easy data presentation, a bar graph can also be used to predict future trends in business, and scientific laboratory analysis.

Works Cited

Evans, William, et al. "Bar 1-visibility graphs and their relation to other nearly planar graphs." J. Graph Algorithms Appl 18.5 (2014): 721-739.

Garg, Shreya, and Rajib Lochan Dhar. "Effects of stress, LMX and perceived organizational support on service quality: Mediating effects of organizational commitment." Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Management 21 (2014): 64-75.

Joos, Derek, et al. "Aligning segments of bar graphs for comparative analysis." U.S. Patent No. 8,914,740. 16 Dec. 2014.

Taher, Faisal, et al. "Exploring interactions with physically dynamic bar charts." Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2015.

Trivellas, Panagiotis, Panagiotis Reklitis, and Charalambos Platis. "The effect of job-related stress on employees' satisfaction: A survey in health care." Procedia-social and behavioral sciences 73 (2013): 718-726.