Introduction                                                         

Work or job activity has a strong impact upon human but it can create stress. Work environment or task affects employee’s mental states such as physical, emotional, social and that’s producing depression, frustration. Worsening of mental health leads to employee’s poor performance to make decision, and communication difficulties in team and group work. The tasks of university teachers have changed significantly in recent years and gradually their work appears to be under pressure. University teachers have numerous responsibilities at home and work place. They performed as a researcher, mentor as well as doing various types of family work, and social work. This high amount of work load leads to decreased job performance and job satisfaction. The cost related with stress is tremendous as claimed by Colligan and Higgins (2006). According to Ali and Newaz (2010), people gradually understand that occupational stress is putting a great impact on their activities, soundness of body and prosperity. The aim of this research was to find out the leading job stressors that the public university faculty members of Bangladesh are currently experiencing.

Review of Literature

According to Chothani (2015), stress is defined as a state in which somebody feels pressure to perform the assigned tasks with the available resources. These situations are created when incompatibility or variation between an individual and the adjacent lead to the outbreak of a stressful situation. As Shahid et al (2011) claimed, stress is the result of a repressive collaboration between a person and the surroundings that goes beyond the boundary of one’s modifying resources.

Human service-oriented jobs like teaching is stressful as dealing with people is ever challenging (Tytherleigh, Webb, Cooper, & Ricketts, 2005). Ironically it is the thoughtful of some people that teaching is a profession of relaxation. Some people think that teachers’ work is traditional. In fact, they add, teachers have plenty of opportunities for enjoying themselves. Some others also think that teachers have direct control over their time schedule, more autonomy, lack of accountability, and less workload. But that is not true at all; these thoughts are mere misconceptions and misunderstandings about teaching as the grass is always greener on the other side (Vanderberghe & Huberman, 1999). The roles of a teacher are more dynamic, complex, and challenging day by day and these things are separated than any other professions in the world (Johnson et al., 2005). Today world is not stagnant, it is ever changing. Teachers do this great job by engaging themselves in research activities, classroom activities, investing time, and working under stress. 

Johnson at al. (2005) conducted a study on 26 different occupations experiencing work related stress. Of the 26 occupations, six were considered the most worrying considering mental and physical concerns and teaching was found one of them. Based on other similar studies conducted previously, it can be said that teaching is a tense profession (Rahman & Avan, 2016).

As far as public university teachers in Pakistan are concerned, homework interface, role vagueness, workload, performance pressure had a direct impact on job stress (Bhatti et al, 2011). Ahsan et al (2009) conducted a research on teaching stressors and most of the cases were of terrific workload, increasing work hour, changing technology, variety of task and meeting performance deadlines. Pearson and Moomaw (2005) claimed that three factors account for to the rise of job stress of the university faculties: Lack of professionalism, lack of recognition, and lack of autonomy.

The Research Gap

Job stress is one of the burning topics of human resource management researches. So, a large number of studies have been conducted by the researchers of India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and some other developed countries to identify the factors of job stress, their possible significances and the tonics to lessen them. Bangladeshi researchers have also done a lot of work on this topic. But their focusing areas were mainly on bankers or other corporate companies’ employees. There were a few studies conducted so far on the public university faculty members who were experiencing huge stress at work. Therefore, this study aimed at identifying the major factors of job stress of faculties serving public universities in Bangladesh.

 Research Method

Results and Discussion

 Table 1 shows the mean, standard deviation and number of respondents (N) in the study. The mean values of the stressors indicate rate payment, autocratic administration, political unrest long, working hour etc. are the important stressors to the public university faculty members of Bangladesh since the mean values of these variable are 4.1600, 3.9600, 3.9600, 3.9300 etc.                           

Table 1. Descriptive statistics of stressors

Based on Likert scale, 5 indicates strongly agree, 4 indicates agree, 3 indicates neutral, 2 indicates disagree and 1 indicates strongly disagree.

 Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett's Test

According to KMOtest, the sampling which is greater than 0.5 is considered satisfactory. Any pair of variables which had a value less than 0.5 was removed from the analysis. As shown in Table 2 below, the KMO measure is 0.566 which indicates that the number of samples was adequate for this study. Bartlett's test is one of the hints that shows the strength of the relationship among variables. In Table 2, the Bartlett's testof sphericity is significant (.000), which means there is a strong correlation among the variables.

 Principal component analysis

To determine the most important stressors in the job of university faculties, principal component analysis was used. It focused on the following statistics:

 Communalities

Communalities express how much of the variance in the variables has been comprised for by the extracted factors. Based on Table 3 below, over 89% of the variance in political is unrest, over 79% of the variance in insufficient resources is made for while 78% of the variance in job security is comprised for. Rest of the variables is shown in the following table:

 Total variance

Total variance determines the number of factors extractable from the analysis along with their eigenvalues, the percent of variance attributable to each factor, and the cumulative variance of the factor and the previous factors. Note that, the first factor accounts for 24.017% of the variance, the second 15.044%, the third 9.165%, and the fourth 8.901%. All the remaining factors are not significant.

 Scree Plot

The scree plot is a graph of the eigenvalues against all the factors whereas theeigenvalues refer to the standardized variance associate with a particular factor. The graph is useful for determining the numbers of factors to retain. Based on graph 1 below, factors 1 to 4 have the eigenvalues more than 1 and the remaining factors (factor 5 to 15) have the eigenvalues of less than 1, so only four factors have been retained out of fifteen.

Graph 1: The Scree Plot

 Rotated Component (Factor) Matrix

Rotated component matrix was used to determine the specific factor under each component. In Table 5 below, one can see the various factors: Job security, role ambiguity, lack of professionalism and lack of recognition are substantially, loaded on Component 1; chances of promotion, long working hour and non-cooperative colleague loaded on component 2; rate of payment, autocratic administrative are substantially loaded on component 3; political unrest loaded on component 4, excessive workload and teacher-student ratio are loaded on component 5, 6, respectively.

Conclusion

There are 53 public universities in Bangladesh. More than 400000 students are receiving higher education from these institutions. If stress levels of faculty members are increasing day by day it will decrease satisfaction levels and it can have negative effects on the nation because teachers are contributing vastly to build up a nation. According to the results of this study, we can see the results where job security, role ambiguity, lack of professionalism and lack of recognition are substantially responsible for job stress. So, it is mandatory to create a favorable environment for the nation builders to encourage them to provide the best service.