MAJCAFE

Mazuin Mat Halif, Narehan Hassan, Mohd Taufiq Saini, Nur Athirah Sumardi, Shereen Noranee, Noor Zalina Zaina
Faculty of Business and Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA

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Abstract

Occupational stress at the workplace is perceived as threatening issue to both employees and organizational performance. It has brought many negative outcomes as a result of today’s dynamic life style and has become a great concern to the management, employees, and other stakeholders of an organization. It is also perceived as a critical issue for employees in dealing with occupational stress. In case of telecommunication companies in Malaysia, occupational stress is a major constraint for the employees to maintain their productivity and performance. A survey was conducted among major telecommunication companies in Malaysia to investigate the social support elements which consisted of emotional, material and informational support as the predictors to occupational stress among employees. It was discovered that social support in general was related to employee’s occupational stress, with only two dimensions (material and informational support) that were found to be related to the dependent variable. This has excluded emotional support dimension as a non-predictor towards occupational stress. Besides, a multiple regression analysis was also conducted and the result revealed that material support was the only dimension of social support that may influence the employees’ occupational stress. Nevertheless, the result has revealed to be parallel to previous researches, supporting that social support was needed in alleviating occupational stress. In future, this study has proposed the importance of investigating other different dimensions of occupational stress such as appraisal support, network support and esteem support.

Keywords: Workplace stress, Social support, Communication and emotional support