International Journal of Business and General Management

1-8

Authors: SAMY ISMAIL A. M. YOUSSEF

Perhaps now more than ever before, job stress poses a threat to the health of employees and, in turn, to the health of organizations. This paper highlights knowledge about the causal agents of stress at the workplace and outlines steps that can be adopted to prevent job stress. Workplace stress has been proven to cause a damaging outcome on the wellness and welfare of employees, as considerably as a negative impact on workplace productivity and profits. There are measures that individuals and organizations can take to alleviate the negative impact of stress, or to stop it from arising in the first place. Nevertheless, employers need to be cognizant of the effects that stress causes on their employees’ health as well as on organization profits. This paper is a call to employers to take action on stress levels in the workplace. Finally, seafaring is a particular profession, in which individuals are commonly revealed to several stresses that are connected to the different duties on board ships. This paper has surveyed the main publications on different factors affecting seafarers with the aim of identifying stress factors. The most significant factors were separated from family, loneliness on board, fatigue, multi-nationality, limited recreation activity, and sleep deprivation.