In the medical community, stress is one of the major causes of illnesses like migraine, stroke, eczema, a weak immune system and many other diseases. It also makes employees in the workplace become unproductive and unmotivated. The impact of stress on cost and productivity is substantial to the organization, yet stress is not given importance. The prevalence of job stress is worldwide. In the United States, Suzukamo Newsroom and Davis (1997) reported that 30 percent of executives believe that their work has adversely affected their health; 40 percent of workers wonder whether or not they are going to have a job next year; 69 percent of workers reported that health problems related to stress made them less productive; and 34 percent of American workers expected to burn out on the job soon. In Japan, the chief executive of at least 12 major Japanese companies including Seiko, Epson, Kawasaki Steel, and Nippon Airways died suddenly during a seven-month period. Many experts think that stress maybe a prime contributor to the death of these executives (Robbins, 1993).
A number of factors (environmental, organizational and individual) moderated by individual differences cause an employee to feel stress. The more frequently these factors occur and themore intensely they are experienced by the employee, the greater the stress that he experiences; job related tension tends to decrease job satisfaction and performance. Stress is defined as an imbalance between demand and resources or as occurring when pressure exceeds one’s perceived ability to cope. Moreover, it is a person’s physiological response to an internal or external stimulus that triggers the fight-or-flight response. It is experienced by an individual if some factors, called stressors, stimulate the feeling of hopelessness, lack of coping mechanism, and pressure. It causes individual to become disoriented and imbalanced.With these impacts and effects of stress to individuals, level of stress experienced by employees of organizations should be studied. The first step in solving unproductiveness and disorientation is to know the level of stress that employees go through. Once the level of stress is identified, the organization can come up with good programs for stress management for its employees. It was in the context that the researcher was able to conceptualize the research paper entitled “Level of Stress Experienced by NWU Employees: Towards Developing a Proposed Stress Management Program” The paper aimed to identify the level of stress experienced by the different levels of employees of the said university. The research compares the level of stress of the different types of employees of the school. Based from the outputs of the study, the researcher proposed a Stress Management Program.