Effects of rational emotive behavioural therapy module on irrational beliefs and job stress among University Support Staff

Abstract

The pressure of workforce to perform maximum output and enhance competitiveness caused the employees to experience stress at the workplace especially among support staff. Based on the Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT) approach, stresses among individuals are largely due to irrational beliefs of a person. The REBT is one of the cognitive behaviour therapy approaches that concentrates on cognitive, emotive and behaviour. However, the development of module that focuses on cognitive aspects in the REBT approach to lessen irrational beliefs and job stress among university support staff is yet to be fully developed. The study developed a REBT Module that has high validity and reliability, and investigated its effects on irrational beliefs and job stress among university support staff. An experimental research which used control group experimental design was employed in this research. The developed REBT Module and Staff Beliefs Questionnaire (SBQ) were tested for their validity and reliability in this study. Using random sampling, 60 support staff from a private university in Perak answered the SBQ and Occupational Stress Indicator (OSI). Data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Science version 16.0. Inferential statistic, namely independent t-test and paired sample t-test were employed in order to test the hypotheses. The effect size was also used to determine the magnitude of REBT Module treatment. The findings indicated that the REBT Module which consists of four sub modules, namely Self-acceptance, Feelings, Beliefs and Disputation had high validity (.91) and reliability (.98) values. In addition, the results of the experimental study showed that there were significant differences between the pre-test and post-test of experimental group, and post-test between experimental group and control group for irrational beliefs, job stress, subscales of irrational beliefs and subscales of job stress. In conclusion, the module developed based on the REBT approach is suitable for support staff in the university to lessen irrational beliefs and job stress.