Stress reduces the performance and productivity of employees.
One of the most important stressors originate from organizational factors,
which are decision latitude, psychological demand, social support and job
insecurity. This creates four kinds of jobs: passive, active, low strain and high
strain. The objective of the study is to determine the association between
organizational factors with occupational stress and cortisol level among
lecturers in University Selangor. This cross-sectional study used a purposive
sampling, which involved 45 lecturers from various faculties. The instrument
used in this study was Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ) which is a
Psychosocial Job Assessment Instrument designed by Karasek et al., (1998).
The questionnaire has been translated to Malay version by Edimansyah et al.,
(2006). 10ml of blood sample was collected from each respondent by certified
phlebotomist. Results from the statistical analysis showed that majority of the
respondents were female (75.6%), aged below forty years old (82.2%), married
(77.8%) and hold a master degree (68.9%). Most of the respondents were
found having low decision latitude 35(77.5%). Majority of the respondents
were also found in passive group 13(28.9%) which were having low
psychological job demand and low decision latitude, while others are in low
strain 11(24.4%), high strain 11(24.4%) and active group 10(22.2%)
respectively. There was a significant association between two organizational
factors with occupational stress level, which are decision latitude and
psychological job demand (p0.05). As a
conclusion, two out of four organizational factors, which are decision latitude
and psychological job demand showed a significant association with
occupational stress levels. Cortisol as one of stress biomarkers may not be
significant due to small sample size.