This publication provides an overview of the most recent ideas on psychological stress and ways to reduce it, with particular attention to the impact of stress on administrative personnel. Major sections of the publication focus on the nature of the educational administrator's job, definitions of stress, responses to stress, consequences of…

This editorial introduces the special edition of "The Journal of Educational Administration" that focuses on stress among school administrators. A commonly accepted four-stage stress cycle is posited to organize, synthesize, and contrast the findings. (TE)

This study examined who deans of education were, where they worked, how they defined roles and responsibilities, what unique challenges faced female deans, how deans characterized their leadership style, what stressors impacted their ability to be effective, and how they maintained balance between scholarship and leadership and between…

Summarizes a study to identify major personal, professional, and organizational characteristics contributing to administrator burnout; to determine salient correlational relationships; and to assess how social support affects job satisfaction, burnout, and performance. The Administrator Work Inventory was given to 1,000 Washington State principals…

Findings of a study that investigated the effect of administrative stressors on administrators' coping responses and the consequences of those responses are presented in this paper. Based on the managerial stress cycle model (Gmelch 1982), the study uses the transactional perspective, which views stress as an individual's physiological or…

School administrators suffer greater stress from administrative constraints than from any other stress factors, according to a survey of over 1,150 Oregon elementary and secondary principals and vice-principals, superintendents, and central office administrators. Researchers isolated 35 stressors, or stress-inducing situations, that could be…

The Administrative Stress Index, a 35-item questionnaire, was designed, validated, and sent to members of the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators to identify perceived job stress, to establish stress categories, and to discover how administrators cope with stress. Usable responses were received from 1,156 elementary and secondary…

This investigation examined the dimensional sources and perceptions of occupational stress experienced by department chairs in institutions of higher education, and the influence of professional independent variables associated with these stressors. Surveys were mailed to 800 randomly selected department chairs at 100 institutions (523 surveys…

This paper reports on a study that investigated the role, attitudes, and behaviors of department chairs in higher education. Specifically, the study investigated four objectives: (1) to examine role factors of effective chair performance; (2) to assess the impact of antecedent variables such as individual characteristics (gender, marital status,…