The Effect of Gender, Age, Experience and Industry on Employees’ Perceived stress: The Case of Bangladesh

Abstract

Literature explaining the causes of widespread work-related stress often focuses more on the stressors, but give less sufficient attention to the perception of the employees who suffers. Stress is not an absolute state of the affairs, it is rather relative, and often depends on the ‘definition of the situation’ of the person of interest. Hence, measuring stress faces the issues of validity and reliability concerning the socio-economic context. The study adopts Cohen’s Perceived Stress Scale (PSS10), the most popular stress measurement tool to explore the stress levels of the employees working in various industries in Bangladesh. The validity and reliability of the scale are tested with two distinguished yet related sample set; Sample one (n=460) considers the employees of sixteen distinct industries, and sample two (n=413) includes exclusively the employees of banking industry. Gender, Age, Industry, and ‘year of experiences’ are considered as the variables of interest to explore their relationships with perceived stress. The results suggest that the level of stress does not very significantly in accordance with gender; however perceived social stress differs in terms of Age, Experience and Industry that a person belongs.