Effect Of Stress On The Performance Of The Employees' Of West African Examination Council (Waec)

Stress is a universal and common challenge to organization and employee performance, it is the reality of modern day workplace. Employees working in different sectors and organizations have to deal with stress. Stress contributes to decreased organizational performance, decreased employee overall performance, high error rate and poor quality of work, high staff turnover, and absenteeism due to health problems such as anxiety, emotional disorder; work life imbalance; depression and other forms of ailments such as frequent headache; obesity and cardiac arrests. This paper aims to examine the effect stress on employee performance. A sample of 153respondents was used for this survey. The objective of the study is to assess the effects of stress on the performance of employees in the West African Examination Council; to ascertain whether working under pressure is a major stressor. The findings of this study indicated that stress significantly reduce the performance of an individual. Job stress is considered rising and has become challenge for the employer and because high level stress results in low productivity, increased absenteeism and collection to other employee problems like alcoholism, drug abuse, hypertension and host of cardiovascular problems. Thus it was recommended that employer should proactively minimize stress by providing adequate administrative support to employees; Optimize work load, effectively manage customer expectations, minimize relationship and role conflict, deploy adequate reward system and provide adequate training and counseling to employees in order to improve their job performance and job satisfaction.