An Investigation of the relationship between Sri Lankan IT professionals' stress levels with demographic factors and working environment

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a research work aimed investigating and analyzing the impact of demographic and working environmental factors and to check whether there is a relationship between them. In general stress is a major factor in Information Technology professional's day to day life and work. The pressure that they work under is very high. Previous researches have already proved that programmer stress is both extremely common and extremely problematic. Then there arise questions in mind asking whether there is a relationship between levels of stress with the IT professionals' work environment and demographic factors and what contemporary factors make more stress in Sri Lanka. The sample of the study included the IT Professionals with certain restrictions of the Software companies which were established five years and more. The Professionals were under the category that they posses more than 5 years of the field experience, at least five subordinates, does more than three projects per year and also posses a senior position in the company. A multiple response questionnaire was developed (Survey Instrument) online to measure the stress levels of the IT professionals, which was based on the Occupational stress indicator (OSI) and Pressure management indicator (PMI) by Williams and Cooper. The data was gathered from 50 respondents among 60 different Software develop men! companies of Sri Lanka. The analysis was carried out using the regression methods and the final findings reveal that there is no relationship between demographic factors and stress levels but there is a relationship between the working environment factors and stress levels. The final result indicate that there is no impact of demographic factors on stress levels but there is a impact of working environmental factors on the stress levels among the IT Professionals of Sri Lankan Software development companies. From the final result of the research the data was also examined on finding a better solution for the problem and the implications of the study were discussed.