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A hybrid decision-making framework to manage occupational stress in project-based organizations

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Abstract

According to recent studies in the field of human resource management (HRM), especially in project-based organizations (PBOs), stress is recognized as a factor that has a paramount significance on the performance of staff. Previous studies in organizational stress management have mainly focused on identifying job stressors and their effects on organizations. Contrary to the previous studies, this paper aims to propose a comprehensive decision-support system that includes identifying stressors, assessing organizational stress levels, and providing solutions to improve the performance of the organization. A questionnaire is designed and distributed among 170 senior managers of a major project-based organization in the field of the energy industry in Iran to determine organizational stressors. Based on the questionnaire results and considering the best worst method (BWM) as an approach to determine the weighting vector, the importance degree of each stressor is calculated. In the next stage, a decision-support model is developed to assess the stress level of a PBO through fuzzy inference systems (FIS). Some main advantages of the proposed hybrid decision-support model include (i) achieving high-reliable results by not-so-time-consuming computational volume and (ii) maintaining flexibility in adding new criteria to assess the occupational stress levels in PBOs. Based on the obtained results, six organizational stressors, including job incongruity, poor organizational structure, poor project environment, work overload, poor job promotion, and type A behavior, are identified. It is also found that the level of organizational stress is not ideal. Finally, some main recommendations are proposed to manage occupational stresses at the optimum level in the considered sector.

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Funding

The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Industrial Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Zeinab Sazvar, Sina Nayeri & Mehrab Tanhaeean

  2. Department of Management, Faculty of Management, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

    Reza Mirbagheri

  3. School of Mechanical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Skudai, Malaysia

    Alireza Fallahpour & Kuan Yew Wong

Authors
  1. Zeinab Sazvar
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  2. Sina Nayeri
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  3. Reza Mirbagheri
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  4. Mehrab Tanhaeean
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  5. Alireza Fallahpour
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  6. Kuan Yew Wong
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Contributions

ZS: Methodology, modeling, data analysis, and writing—original draft preparation, supervision; SN: Material preparation, modeling, data analysis, and writing—original draft preparation; RM: Material preparation, data collection, modeling, and writing—original draft preparation; MT: Methodology, modeling, and visualization; AF: Methodology, modeling, and data analysis; KYW: Methodology, modeling, data analysis, and supervision.

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Correspondence to Zeinab Sazvar.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Tables 11, 12 and 13 .

Table 11 The experts’ opinions about the criteria for measuring the level of job stress at the organization
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Table 12 The nomenclature
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Table 13 Experts description
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Sazvar, Z., Nayeri, S., Mirbagheri, R. et al. A hybrid decision-making framework to manage occupational stress in project-based organizations. Soft Comput 26, 12445–12460 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-022-07143-3

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