An Assessment of Spirituality and its Relationship to Stress with Special Reference to Post Graduation Diploma in Hospital and Health Management Student
Author(s): Ayushi Bhatnagar*
Abstract
A growing number of researchers and organizations have started considering spirituality to be a critical component of effective management to reduce stress. Spiritual people have reduced stress. Health care managers suffer from work-related or occupational stress. Health care people need to be more spiritual, so that their stress level is less and they can easily provide care to the others who are ill and need a treatment. They believe that spirituality is essential for effective operations of an organization. Organizations are looking for the better-educated, new generation of managers who are not only intelligent, but also spiritual by nature. The purpose of the current research is to assess the preparedness of management students from spiritual perspective. Furthermore, it also explores the relationship between management students’ perception of their own spirituality and stress. Perceived spirituality and perceived stress is measured in health care managers. Perceived spirituality scale contains 28 items and Perceived stress scale contains 14 items asked from 195 students of IIHMR of post graduate of health care. Females are more than males in this course and most students are Hindus. Spirituality scores of the overall samples the results can be generalized since the significance value (p) was found to be less than 0.05. Independent sample T test on spirituality based on gender and was found not to be significant but batch wise sample is significant as the value was found to be less than 0.05. Stress scores of the overall samples the results can be generalized as the significance value (p) was found to be less than 0.05. Independent T test on stress based on gender and batch wise and were found not to be significant as the value was not found to be less than 0.05.
There is negative relation between perceived spirituality and perceived stress means that as the level of spirituality increases, stress level goes down. However, it is also to be noticed that the strength of relationship is very weak (r=-0.029). The results were also found to be insignificant (p>0.05), which means that the results cannot be generalized. With the changing work demand, it has become essential to have a high level of spiritualism in individuals to perform their best. Therefore, it has become important to focus on the spiritual growth and competence of the management students. It can be inferred from this that an individual who is spiritual can cope up with stress better than the individual who is not spiritual.