Coping strategies of job stress among managers of electronics industries in Malaysia

Job stress is ubiquitous in today’s organizations, and the costs of these phenomena cut across all levels of society. In recent years, researchers considering job stress in the workplace have made great strides in understanding several aspects of the stress phenomenon in the field of organizational behavior. Thus, it becomes more important that the coping methods of these job stresses are well explored and directly linked to individuals experiencing this situation, in order to ensure the right methods can be used for the best benefits in coping with job stresses. This research presents an integration of past research and theory that models the relationship of antecedents of job stress and coping methods among managers. The scope of this study is limited to managerial positions in electronics firms in Malaysia. Job stress antecedents in this study are related to organizational sources of stress and individual’s personality traits. A set of demographic factors like age, gender and length of services, to name a few, are also studied as influencing factors to job stress. The final framework in this study includes the coping variables, in which will determine the best and most suitable coping methods for managers under job stress. A proportional sampling plan will be done to cover the surveys to be covering all major locations of electronics firms in Malaysia. Theoretical and managerial implications of the study will be discussed in details. The implication of the study would be extremely beneficial for electronics organizations in not only identifying the organizational sources of job stress, but also to understand the personality behaviors of their management staffs. More importantly, this study will recommend the best coping methods for managers that would enable the leadership team in the electronics organizations to be able to handle job stress more efficiently. This paper will discuss the pilot study results of this research

Eigen Subspace based Direction of Arrival Estimation for Coherent Sources

Direction of arrival (DOA) estimation technology plays an important role in enhancing the performance of the adaptive arrays for mobile communication. In this paper comparative performance analysis of eigen subspace based DOA estimation for coherent sources is presented. A number of DOA estimation algorithms based on eigen subspace method have been developed. Among these MUSIC algorithm is considered to have exceptionally good results. The focus of this paper is to unveil the performance characteristics of MUSIC algorithm and its improved version for coherent sources. The simulation results show that the improved MUSIC algorithm is the best. Also it can be observed that the resolution of DOA estimation improves as the number of snapshots and signal to noise ratio increases

Athletic training and psychological predictors pf injury:a case study of Malaysian professional football players involved in Malaysian football league

Sport psychology deals with many aspects, which are important in sports and games.Injury is one of the common things one can observe in most of the sport and games. Injuries occur either by accident or intentionally. There are many reasons one can think of injuries occurring and that psychological aspect is considered more important. Psychological predictors, psychological impacts, and psychological aspects of rehabilitation are vital to know. Therefore, the objective of the study is to determine psychological predictors leading to athletic injury with focusing to Malaysian football players involved in Malaysian Professional Football League. A descriptive method of research was used to determine the psychological predictors of injury among the selected state team players. A pilot study has been carried out to test the validity and reliability of the questionnaire. Cluster sampling was used to get the actual number of subjects. Based on this sampling method, all teams were clustered into five groups (North, South, East, West and East Malaysia). From these five groups, two teams from each cluster have randomly picked up as a subject (25 players each team x 10 teams = 250 players). Questionnaires, observation, and interview were the instruments that being used in determining psychological predictors of injury. For statistical analysis, Multiple Logistic Regression was used to identify the psychological predictors of injuries by using the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 9.0 for windows. The results of this study has showed that most of the Malaysian professional football players scored higher in neuroticism, and lower in agreeableness and conscientiousness. The subjects were also found experiencing anxiety with poor self-esteem and mental toughness as well

Multicentric tuberculosis at two rare sites in an immunocompetent adult

The case of a 20-year-old female who presented with refractory coccydynia and sternal pain is described. She was immunocompetent, and had no systemic features. She was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the sternal and coccygeal regions based on magnetic resonance imaging and histopathology of biopsy specimens. Conservative management with oral multidrug antituberculous therapy completely cured the patient, and she had not suffered any recurrence after three years of follow-up. This case highlights the possibility of the multicentric presentation of tuberculosis at two rare sites in the same immunocompetent patient, even though the differential diagnosis was coccydynia

Alexithymia and somatization in psychiatric and medical patients

315 subjects comprising of equal number of psychiatric and medical patients; and control group were randomly selected for the study. Neuroses and depressive illness of the psychiatric group was chosen through psychiatric clinic. The medical outpatients attending physician clinic formed the medical group while the control group was identified from staff and patients relatives. The selected patient was administered a series of questionnaires such as Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS), Middlesex Hospital Questionnaires (MHQ) and Duke Health Profile (DUKE) after the diagnosis was confirmed. The psychiatric patient was further evaluated using Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HDS) and Hamilton Anxiety Rating Scale (HAS) for assessment of severity of depression and anxiety respectively.172 (55%) subjects had positive TAS score and consider as alexithymia. The prevalence of alexithymia was significantly higher in psychiatric and medical patients than the control group. The number of alexithymia among patients with underlying depression and anxiety were significantly increased. In general individual with alexithymia had significantly higher number of personality trait than healthy volunteer. There were marked psychosocial impairments and physical disability in psychiatric and medical patients respectively. However the difference was small and did not reach the level of significant. Although we cannot link alexithymia with a specific factor, most likely it is the product of personality disturbances aggravated by medical and psychiatric illness, especially depression and anxiety

Filarial/Human Immunodeficiency Virus Coinfection in Urban Southern India

The disease course of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is often altered by existing or newly acquired coinfections. Treatment or prevention of these concomitant infections often improves the quality and duration of life of HIV-infected persons. The impact of helminth infections on infections with HIV is less clear. However, HIV is frequently most problematic in areas where helminth infections are common. In advance of the widespread distribution of drugs for elimination of lymphatic filariasis, we assessed the prevalence of active Wuchereria bancrofti infection among HIV-positive patients in Chennai, India at two time points separated by four years. We found that the overall prevalence of W. bancrofti infections among HIV-positive persons was 5–9.5%, and there were no quantitative differences in circulating filarial antigen levels between HIV-positive and HIV-negative filarial-infected patients

Recent trends in cephalopod fishery of Kerala coast

Since the Cephalopods have emerged as a valuable resource in recent times because of the demand in export trade, constant monitoring of the fishery, resource position and relevant biological aspects has become imperative. The resource characteristics and biological aspects of cephalopods are being regularly monitored at Vizhinjam, Cochin and Calicut by CMFRI Scientists, Dr. N. Ramachandran, Shri. K. Prabhakaran Nair, Smt. V. Kripa and Shri. G.P. Kumaraswamy Achari