These stressors can affect the employee's relations with the work group, the company's customer, and the supervisor. All these causes of job stress create a cumulative stress effect as they build up in the employee. These factors also moderate the relationship between potential stressors and experienced stress. Research has found perception, job experience, locus of control and Type A behaviour to influence this relationship. Perception is a moderator because it shows that we react less to the reality of the situation than to how we interpret the situation.
Reality matters less than our perception of it as a cause of stress.
What one employee may view as a job challenge another employee may view as a threat to his job security. Job experience is a powerful stress reducer once it is acquired. But, for the new employee or the recently transferred employee in a new job, the absence of job experience is a powerful stressor that can be the basis for role ambiguity and fears of inadequate or obsolete knowledge. Accumulated job experience is the acquisition of job coping skills by employees. Employees who are well-practised and confident because their job skills are more numerous than their untested colleagues do not experience, with the same intensity and frequency, the alarm stage in the General Adaptation Syndrome.