Work stress has become one of the key challenges since the COVID-19 pandemic started. Every organisation is trying to balance job demands with job resources toward work stress. Especially for Malaysian Small and Medium Enterprises with limited resources and a heavy reliance on workers to carry out business activities. The objective of the study is to identify the factors that impact work stress on workers in Small and Medium Enterprises in Malaysia. Workload and role conflict fall under job demands. While supervisor support and co-worker support fall under job resources, A total of 463 sample sets of questionnaires to Small and Medium Enterprises workers in Malaysia have been distributed for data collection, with a total of 404 qualified questionnaires being used in the research analysis. The data is being analysed using IBM SPSS version 2.0. The methods used in the research are normality, Spearman Correlation, Kruskal-Wallis Analysis, Kruskal-Wallis Mean Rank Analysis, and Dunn Post-hoc Test Analysis in the research. The study found that workload and role conflict have a positive and significant relationship with work stress. Whereby, supervisor support has a negative significant relationship with work stress and co-worker support has a negative insignificant relationship with work stress. This research result offers useful information to Small and Medium Enterprises in Malaysia to understand more about their workers' well-being and challenges in performing the work. Furthermore, through the underpinning theory of Becker’s Side-bet Theory and the causal model, management of Small and Medium Enterprises in Malaysia is able to understand the effect of the COVID-19 endemic on work stress and commitment among the workers. In conclusion, this research has validated the proposed conceptual framework and research objective. The research questions have been successfully responded to and the results from this study will be contributed to a future study on work stress.
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