The concept of executive stress: between theoretical models and individual representations

Abstract

The difficulty posed by research on executive stress is twofold. On the one hand, the executive is a subject that is difficult to grasp. On the other hand, stress as a research concept is unclear.

The writings on work stress argue that this notion remains poorly defined (Machado et al., 2014) and ambiguous, being the object of several uses (emotional, social) confused and difficult to determine (Grebot, 2010; Guillet & Hermand, 2006; Lancry, 2007).

This paper intervenes to reduce the ambiguity surrounding the notion of professional stress among SME executives. This aim prompted a semantic reflection, first with stress models based on an inventory of 17 explanatory models of stress, taken from the literature review. Then, on the jargon used in the answers to the questionnaire by 164 SME executives from the Oriental region of Morocco when they answered the question "how do you define professional stress? ».The inventory of professional stress models reveals that not all of them are adapted to the specificities of SME executives. The most suitable are the models that give importance to the individual aspect, especially the perception. More than two thirds of executives define their stress by expressing different emotions that they consider in relation to their stress, thing that is not always verified. Similarly, only 7 answers out of 164 are retained as being appropriate definitions having regard to those adopted by the authors of occupational stress. For the sake of clarification, this work tries to respond to the problematic of the definition of executive stress and to highlight some clues of their perceptions.