Authors:

Abstract

Banking is one of the very important sector in the Sri Lankan economy and the public sector banks play a big role in this context. However, after the privatization of financial sector in Sri Lanka the banking is become more competitive and the employees working in this sector struggle in achieving their targets given to them by their superiors. This situation making them very stressful not only in the work place but also in their personal life as well. Therefore, there is a need to identify that to what extent the organizational role related factor are the causes to occupational stress among the public sector bank employees. This is an exploratory study and carried out through field survey. Though this type of study is more useful to both state and private banks, this particular study covered only two important state banks namely Bank of Ceylon (BOC) and Peoples Bank (PB) functioning in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka. The total of 120 employees and 60 from Peoples Bank and 60 from Bank of Ceylon were taken for the study based on Stratified Random Sampling method. The data were collected through a structured questionnaire followed by an open ended interview with bank employees. From the data collected from the respondents and the analysis made by the researcher the mean value of the total Occupational Role Stress (TORS) indicated as 89.9. Further, among the ten occupational stressors evaluated in this study, the inter-role distance (Mean value 9.8) , role isolation (Mean value 9.5), and personal inadequacy (Mean value 9.6) of state bank employees in Sri Lanka have highly influenced to their occupational stress. Therefore, it has been revealed that there is a moderate – high level of occupational stress among the public sector bank employees in Sri Lanka.

Keywords: Occupational Role Stress, Peoples Bank, Bank of Ceylon