ABSTRACT
This paper argues that workstress has a high likelihood of occasioning crises within the tourism industry; crises arise when organizational processes engender stress among workers, producing both short-term and long-term dysfunction and disability. Workstress may also be responsible for the appearance of unethical and destructive responses among members of the tourism industry workforce. Such outcomes, it is concluded, will lead to loss of organizational morale, to reduction of individual and organizational productivity, to damage to customer bases, and to a diminution of profits and perhaps even the basic viability of any firm or organization. Finally workstress may eventually cause a reduction in the living standards among many within a tourist destination should a climate of workstress become widespread and entrenched among many tourism enterprises. It is thus suggested that industry workstress is not only a crisis of personal proportions for tourism industry personnel; it can occasion a crisis having organizational and community dimensions, containing the potency to harm many people who, at first blush, may seem to have a relatively minor or indirect relationship with the tourism industry.
