Occupational Stress, Coping Strategies, Health, and Well-Being Among University Academic Staff—An Integrative Review

Occupational stress has been constantly rising among academics in universities globally, which affects their health and well-being. Although some studies reviewed occupational stress in academics, there has been less systematic evidence reviewed occupational stress of academic staff through the lens of the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (TTSC). This integrative review aims to search, extract, appraise and synthesise recent evidence relating to occupational stress, coping strategies, health, and well-being of university academic staff. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) methodology provides a structure for searching and reporting the search outcomes. Primary studies relating to occupational stress, coping strategies, health, and well-being of academics in university published from 2010 onwards were selected from five databases, CINAHL, ERIC, PsycINFO, SCOPUS, and Web of Science in June 2020. Keywords included “stress”, “coping strategy”, “health”, “well-being”, “academics” and “university” in various combinations. The boolean operators “AND” and “OR” were also used. 17 out of 682 articles were included in this review. Most studies reported academics experienced moderate to high level of stress, and the heavy workload was one of the main stressors. Both positive and negative coping methods were used by academics to cope with stress. Occupational stress can contribute to poor mental health and decreased well-being of academics. This review can help to understand the work phenomenon of university academics and improve their health and well-being, which in turn can contribute to satisfaction and productivity within the educational institutes.


Introduction
Teaching is complicated in educational settings; it is marked by a large number of competencies and abilities that teachers have to acquire throughout their professional careers (Puertas, Zurita, Ubago, & González, 2019), which resultantly puts high stress on them (Chaudhry, 2012). The academics, especially in the higher education institutions are recognised that they have experienced higher occupational stress compared to other populations (Adewale, Ghavifekr, & Abdulsalam, 2017;Singh, Cross, Munro, & Jackson, 2020). The statistics of Education Support (2019) showed 72% of teachers were stressed at work, and 63% were considering leaving their current position.

Conceptualisation of Stress
Stress remains a difficult concept to define, with researchers employing various models to explain aversive experiences of stress (Watts & Robertson, 2011). Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) theoretical model (Transactional Stress and Coping Theory (TTSC)) (see Figure 1) of stress, coping and their relations to health and well-being was accepted widely (Lee & Roberts, 2018). The individual appraisal is the basic component of the model; person-environment encounters and reactions to stress are mediated through a process of three types of cognitive appraisal: primary, secondary, and reappraisal (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Primary appraisal is an essential assessment that evaluates the possible effects of the demands and resources on health and well-being. The secondary appraisal concerns possible coping options for overcoming the threat or challenge when a situation is evaluated as potentially stressful. As the situation develops further, reappraisal involves a constant re-evaluation about how stressful the situation is based on new information from the environment (Bell, Rajendran, & Theiler, 2012). Obviously, stress is a complicated phenomenon in which health consequences are dependent upon each individual and how they deal with stressors (Bell et al., 2012). High stress leads to ill-being, poor health concerns ies.ccsenet. and poor jo coping stra and develo  Vol. 14, No. 12; adaption to moderate work stress conversely (Müller & Schumann, 2011;Sattler, Sauer, Mehlkop, & Graeff, 2013). However, there is a lack of evidence on this finding.

Health and Well-Being of Academics
Occupational stress contributes to ill-health among employees (Watts & Robertson, 2011;Ejue, 2013;Shaw, 2014), which has led to a high rate of absenteeism, high staff turnover, low productivity, early retirement and strikes (Basu et al., 2017;Aquino, Lee, Spawn, & Bishop, 2018). High levels of occupational stress also have been associated with increased risk of cardiovascular diseases (Basu et al., 2017), comparing to people with low work stress, people with high occupational stress had more than twice the chance of getting cardiovascular disease (Wilson, Conroy, & Dorevitch, 2014). Occupational stress has the most significant effect on mental health (Holton et al., 2016). Mental health refers to a state of well-being in which individuals realise their own abilities can cope with stress in life (Lombardo, 2018;WHO, 2018). According to the statistic in America (ADAA, 2016), there were nearly 40 million Americans experience mental disorder, especially anxiety disorder annually, and they were among the most susceptible populations to endure mental health disorders due to their stress at work and inability to cope with stressors (Fan, Blumenthal, Watkins, & Sherwood, 2015;Mérida-López, Extremera, & Rey, 2017;Alvarado, 2019). The Health and Safety Executive (2020) reports that 0.6 million employees in the UK developed occupational illnesses such as depression, anxiety, and nervousness between years from 2018 to 2019, and there was number of higher education staff accessing occupational health services because of poor mental health (Guthrie et al., 2018;Weale, 2019). Academics in Australia were suffering from poor mental health due to long working hours (Fontinha et al., 2019), while the impact of occupational stress on the health of academic staff at higher educational institutions is not fully explored (S. Dreyer, L. Dreyer, & Rankin, 2010). The general well-being of academics was decreased according to recent studies (Slišković & Maslić-Seršič, 2011). A survey in the UK reported low well-being and higher stress amongst academics when compared with other staff members (Qudah, Davies, & Deakin, 2019). High rates of stress-related health problem in work also impose a considerable social and financial burden on society (Skakon et al., 2010;Fontinha et al., 2019). The fact that millions of pounds have been paid out on teachers' mental and physical health in the UK (Mulholland, 2012); depression alone costs $44 million in America yearly (Battams et al., 2014). Moreover, teachers in Queensland have increased mental health problems and claims which resulted in over $10 million expenditure on them in five years (Worksafe Queensland, 2014).

Rationale for Review
Addressing occupational stress and promoting the health and well-being of academics are necessary for the sake of quality education (Quraishi et al., 2018). Although occupational stress has been studied in recent years, there is still an obvious lack of studies in higher education, especially in academics (Mark & Smith, 2012;Li & Kou, 2018). Furthermore, in recent years, there are many changes in the higher education environment, academic faculty face many new challenges in different countries; these issues are worthy of more systematic analysis and empirical research. In this circumstance, an up-to-date comprehensive review of the evidence is fundamentally imperative. TTSC will be used to guide the present study; it enables to organise the study topic. Hopefully, this study will lead to more future studies in the workplace of the university and develop policies and methods to improve the health and well-being of academics.

Study Aims
This integrative review aims to search, extract, appraise and synthesise recent evidence relating to occupational stress, coping strategies, health, and well-being of academics in higher education.
The review was guided by the following questions: (1) What are the sources and levels of occupational stress in these studies?
(2) What are the main coping strategies used by academic staff to cope with occupational stress?
(3) What is the status of health or well-being within university academic staff?
(4) What is the relationship between occupational stress, health and well-being along with coping strategies?

Methodology
The integrative review process proposed by Whittemore and Knafl (2005) was used to guide this review. This review method allows the inclusion of diverse study designs, and it helps to facilitate a fully understanding of certain study concerns (Whittemore & Knafl, 2005). According to them, the stages of an integrative review include problem identification, literature search, data evaluation, data analysis, and data presentation (Whittemore & Knafl, 2005). The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) (Moher, Liberati, Tetzlaff, Altman, & Group P, 2010) methodology provided a structure for searching and reporting results. The theoretical framework of the Transactional Model of Stress and Coping (TTSC) (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984) provided the structure to organise, analyse, and synthesise the findings of this integrative review.

Search Strategy 2.1.1 Databases
The systematic search was conducted in June 2020. Five electronic databases were used to search relevant studies: CINAHL, ERIC, PsycINFO, SCOPUS, and Web of Science. The coverage and time provided for each database shown in Table 1. The additional studies were identified with a search of relevant literature from the reference lists of selected studies.

Search Terms and Boolean Operators
Search terms were derived from the analysis of key studies which included "stress", "coping strategy", "health", "well-being", "academics" and "university", and their related search terms in various combinations. Table 2 shows the Example of the search strategy for CINAHL. coping N3 (mechanism* or behavio#r* or strateg* or skill* or method*) OR "stress management" S6 S4 OR S5 S7 health OR wellbeing OR well-being OR "life satisfaction" OR "quality of life" S8 university N3 (staff or teacher* or lecturer* or professor* or researcher* or educator* or faculty or academician or employee*) OR college N3 (staff or teacher* or lecturer* or professor* or researcher* or educator* or faculty or academician or employee*) OR "higher education" N3 (staff or teacher* or lecturer* or professor* or researcher* or educator* or faculty or academician or employee*) S9 S3 AND S8 S10 S3 AND S6 AND S8 S11 S3 AND S7 AND S8 S12 S6 AND S7 AND S8 S13 S3 AND S6 AND S7 AND S8

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria
The inclusion criteria were: (a) full-text primary articles published in English in the period from 2010 to 2020, (b) studies published in peer-reviewed journals, (c) papers that used a qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods approach; for quantitative research, the study should explain the measurement tools, (d) studies including academics who worked only in higher education, and (e) studies clearly described findings related to occupational stress or stressors along with coping strategies, health or wellbeing of academic staff in higher education. This review excluded publications such as newspaper articles, conference papers, books, and dissertations. Papers that did not explicitly explore target themes (i.e., occupational stress, coping strategies, health, or wellbeing), and did not focus on academics in higher education settings were excluded.

Characteristics of Studies
There is an overview of the main characteristics of 17 studies included in this review (Appendix A), according to author, year, country, the purpose of study, methodology, population, sample size, setting, instrument, data collection method, and limitation.

Method and Design
15 (88.2%) studies utilised a quantitative approach, one (5.9%) study utilized a qualitative approach, and one (5.9%) study utilized a mixed-methods approach. Regarding the design adopted by the included studies; 15 studies were guided using a cross-sectional design, one study used an interview approach (Priyadarshini et al., 2015), and one study used both cross-sectional design and interview approach (Fadel et al., 2019).

Sample Size and Sample Socio-demographics
Of these included studies, 15 quantitative studies with sample sizes ranging from 50 to 5,445 academic staff members. The sample size of academics of one qualitative study and one mixed-methods study was 64 and 161, respectively. Most studies were relatively more likely to report gender, age, education degree, academic rank, employment status, work experience and marital status of participants. Nevertheless, few studies reported ethnic group; and no study report a religious affiliation.

Quality Assessment
Most studies have clear aims, appropriate sample size, designs and outcome analysis. Some common limitations across the articles included a lack of consideration of confounders and existed bias. Some articles did not report ethical issues. The findings of most studies have the limitation of generalizability as the study is based on self-reporting in one single university in academics.

Main Outcomes
Synthesis of main findings was categorised into stress prevalence and level, stressors, coping strategies, health, and well-being (Appendix B).

Prevalence and Level of Stress
It can be inferred from ten papers that 22.3% (Shen et al., 2014) to 54.1% (Li & Kou, 2018) academics were experiencing stress in tertiary education institutions. Most of academics experienced moderate levels of stress in the universities of Australia, China and India (Bell et al., 2012;Meng & Wang, 2018;Sawhney & Bansal, 2013). Two studies from China and Brazil reported a high stress level of academics (Li & Kou, 2018;Tavares et al., 2012), and only one study showed moderate to very high stress levels experienced by academics in India (Priyadarshini et al., 2015). The variability in prevalence rates of stress may be due to the difference in measurement tools too.

Stress in Relation to Socio-Demographics
A number of socio-demographic characteristics had an impact on stress. Gender, age, employment status, income, academic rank, and teaching experience were found to be associated with increased occupational stress. A survey ies.ccsenet.org Vol. 14, No. 12; in Canadian universities found female academics have more risk of stress compared to male faculty (Catano et al., 2010), a similar result was also reported in higher education institutions in British (Fontinha et al., 2019). However, no differences in gender were identified on stress in the studies of Darabi et al. (2017), Li and Kou (2018) and Meng and Wang (2018) in some universities. Some findings reported age to be correlated with stress. This was supported by Meng and Wang (2018) who found that academics under 40 years old were suffering from a high level of occupational stress. In the studies of Catano et al. (2010) and Li and Kou (2018), academics between the ages of 36 and 45 were likely to experience higher stress. Older academic faculty (over 56) and younger academic faculty (below 35) were reported experienced a lower level of psychological stress (Fontinha et al., 2019;Li & Kou, 2018). Temporary workers were experiencing high levels of stress (Fontinha et al., 2019); conversely, the full-time or part-time employment factor was reported did not make a statistically significant difference in the stress experienced by academic staff in Darabi et al.'s (2017) study. The academic rank and teaching experience factors reported by Meng and Wang (2018) showed that assistant professors experienced a higher level of stress than the associate professors and professors; and those working over ten years at the institution reported more stress compared to those with less working experience. These results are consistent with Tavares et al.'s (2012) but diverged from the finding of Darabi et al.'s (2017) study, which revealed no significant differences were found in terms of the level of seniority on the stress in the university.

Stress Sources
Stress was affected by a number of internal and external factors. These include: External factors: Heavy workload as the main factor contributed to stress among academics was identified by most studies (Catano et al., 2010;Iqbal & Kokash, 2011;Khan et al., 2016;Li & Kou, 2018). Women, ages between 30 and 59, assistant and associate professor, and tenure track faculty reported high levels of stressors on workload compared to other groups (Catano et al., 2010). Only one study found the stress level of teachers who worked more than ten hours per day was less than that of teachers working less than eight hours per day (Li & Kou, 2018). Administrative problems and unfair reward were identified as high levels of stressors among academics in a survey of Canadian university (Catano et al., 2010). Similarly, a study conducted by Fadel et al. (2019), Fontinha et al. (2019) and Meng and Wang (2018) also reported administrative affairs, salary and benefits issues were stressors in academics. Attending meetings, scientific research, publication targets and supervision of programs were recognised as stressors by several studies (Fadel et al., 2019;Iqbal & Kokash, 2011;Meng & Wang, 2018;Li & Kou, 2018;Priyadarshini et al., 2015;Tavares et al., 2012). Priyadarshini et al. (2015) conducted a qualitative study among 64 professors in business schools in India, found that academics stated more stressors on increased changes, expectations, and competition in institutions.
Internal factors: The emotion of academics reflected their stress status . The lack of job control, role conflict and role clarity led to added stress (Catano et al., 2010). Ineffective relationships and communication with colleagues in work were regarded as high levels of stressors in the universities of the UK (Fontinha et al., 2019), Pakistan  and Saudi Arabia (Iqbal & Kokash, 2011); only the study in Saudi Arabia drew that this source was the least pressured compared to other stressors.

Coping Strategies
Adaptive coping styles were used by academics in most studies. Academics were more likely to use problem-focused coping methods to manage stress in a British university Darabi et al. (2017). The positive cognitive appraisal was employed by the university academics in India (Priyadarshini et al., 2015), which aligned with the study of Darabi et al.'s (2017). One study showed that the psychological capital approach, which can be considered emotional-focused coping styles, was the preferred coping style in dealing with stress among academics in six Chinese universities (Shen et al., 2014). Transference such as exercise, attending activities and social interaction were the most popular coping strategies among academics in Brazil (Fadel et al., 2019), Saudi Arabia (Iqbal & Kokash, 2011) and India (Priyadarshini et al., 2015). Maladaptive coping styles were only reported in two studies. Alcohol consumption was used by 82% of professors in a private university in Spain (Ruisoto et al., 2017), 13.1% reported problematic alcohol drinking (Ruisoto et al., 2017). Male professors were more likely to have alcohol drinking than female professors (Ruisoto et al., 2017). As for drug use, Wiegel, Sattler, Göritz, and Diewald (2016) found that the academics in four German universities were using CE-drug to manage stress in work, but the prevalence of CE-drug use was very low.

Health
Health problems were the main outcomes of stress and negative coping strategies. The research of mental health of academics among these studies was more than physical health. 13% of academics reported psychological distress in Canadian universities (Catano et al., 2010). High levels of occupational stress of academics were correlated with ies.ccsenet.org International Education Studies Vol. 14, No. 12; greater levels of mental health issues (Catano et al., 2010;Kinman, 2016); it was also supported by Tavares et al.'s (2012) study, which found that nursing professors with high stress levels in the university have a great chance of getting minor psychiatric disorders. 43% of academic staff was in poor mental health in China (Li & Kou, 2018); 50% academics experienced a mild level of anxiety, 49% had social dysfunction and depression symptoms in Pakistan . The prevalence of depressive symptoms (58.9%) was even higher among Chinese academics according to Shen et al.'s (2014) study. Some socio-demographic characteristics significantly contributed to the health problems among academics. Female academics have more physical and psychological health problems than male faculty (Catano et al., 2010). However, this result was not consistent with Khan et al.'s (2016), which found that single, male faculty members were suffering from higher anxiety, depression and social dysfunction problems than female faculty. However, Shen et al. (2014) found that differences in depression for gender and marital status were not statistically significant. Young faculty members (20-40 years old) were reported experienced higher mental health disorders than other age groups in a survey in 12 Pakistan universities, while the study in 56 Canadian universities found youngest and oldest age groups of academics reported the fewest number of health problems than the age of 30-59 (Catano et al., 2010). The result of the study in Canadian universities aligned with Shen et al.'s (2014), which found that teachers with the age of 31 and 40 in Chinese universities had higher levels of depression than other age groups. Professors were found had a lower level of mental disorders than other academic ranks (Catano et al., 2010;Shen et al., 2014;Khan et al., 2016).

Well-Being
Few papers investigated the stress-related well-being of academics in higher institutions. A higher level of occupational stress did contribute to poorer well-being among academics (Catano et al., 2010;Bell et al., 2012;Fontinha et al., 2019;Sawhney & Bansal, 2013). In an Indian university, college teachers reported had average life satisfaction levels (Sawhney & Bansal, 2013), a similar finding was also found in a cross-sectional survey among academics in Australia; academics experienced mild levels of well-being and low levels of ill-being (Bell et al., 2012). Academics in Canada had a decreased positivity towards their well-being in the university according to Catano et al. (2010). Some socio-demographic characteristics also contribute to well-being among academics. Male faculty was likely to express higher levels of positive well-being than female faculty in two studies (Catano et al., 2010;Fontinha et al., 2019). According to Catano et al.'s (2010) study, tenure-track faculty reported better well-being than contract academics in Canadian universities (Catano et al., 2010); however, academics with tenure track in British universities were more likely to have poorer well-being than temporary workers (Fontinha et al., 2019). The youngest and oldest age groups reported better well-being than other age groups, assistant professors reported the least positive well-being compared to other academic ranks in the Catano et al.'s (2010) study in Canada. Factors included gender, employment status and academic rank of academics were found had no effect on mental health and well-being measures in Darabi et al.'s (2017) study in the UK.

Relations
Occupational stress of university teachers has a significant positive impact on negative coping style and negative impact on positive coping style directly (Darabi et al., 2017;Jiang et al., 2017). Stress predicted poorer mental health (Catano et al., 2010;Darabi et al., 2017;Kinman, 2016;Shen et al., 2014;Tavares et al., 2012) and well-being (Bell et al., 2012;Catano et al., 2010;Fontinha et al., 2019;Sawhney & Bansal, 2013) among academics. Nevertheless, Jiang et al. (2017) supported that occupational stress can indirectly affect the mental health of academics through negative coping styles and positive coping styles. Problem-focused coping style was related to mental health and well-being positively (Darabi et al., 2017). Although emotion-focused coping has no association with mental health, it was positively correlated with the well-being of academics (Darabi et al., 2017). Conversely, dysfunctional coping style predicted poorer mental health while it has no relationship with well-being (Darabi et al., 2017). Overall, most studies addressed the relations of stress, coping, health, and well-being separately, there is no study that holistically investigate and synthesise their relationship.

Discussion
This integrative review aims to search, extract, appraise and synthesise recent evidence relating to occupational stress, coping strategies, health, and well-being of academics in higher education through the lens of TTSC. Most studies adopted the cross-sectional design and used a self-reported survey to collect data, while this method can limit the scope of the study, more current studies also employed it in the study. For instance, Soares et al. (2019) used a self-reported survey to collect the stress data of professors in a federal public university. The Faculty Stress Index (FSI) (Gmelch et al., 1986) was one of the most common instruments used to measure stress in the included studies. It was also used in the Moeller and Chung-Yan (2013) and Kang and Sidhu's (2015) studies to evaluate the stress in professors in Canadian university and Indian university, respectively. Standardization of an instrument to ies.ccsenet.org International Education Studies Vol. 14, No. 12; measure stress among academics would help examine stress comparatively and provide a more accurate picture worldwide.
It was apparent that most of academics in higher education were experiencing moderate to high levels of stress. Female academics experienced higher levels of stress than male faculty in most included studies. Similarly, recent evidence showed work-related stress was more prevalent among female faculty than among male faculty at university (Imran et al., 2016;HSE, 2019). Heavy workload as the main factor that contributed to stress among academics was identified by most studies reviewed, which is consistent with the finding conducted by Jawabri et al. (2019) in academics in the United Arab Emirates. Workplace bullying was reported as a stressful phenomenon that impacts the health and wellness of academics in higher education (Giorgi et al., 2016;Pheko, 2018;Hollis, 2019). Nevertheless, this stress source was not reported in the included 17 studies. Although there were some common stressors among academics, differences also existed. This may be caused by the education model and cultural background (Bhurtun et al., 2019) of different sectors. Using alcohol and drugs as negative coping strategies were reported in two studies in this review. However, Müller and Schumann (2011) and Sattler et al. (2013) reported the use of drugs among academics can be a beneficial adaption to moderate occupational stress. Apart from the above two approaches, smoking and an unhealthy diet were also commonly adopted by academics to cope with stress (Carton & Fruchart, 2014). Occupational stress can indirectly affect the mental health and well-being of academics through negative coping style and positive coping style; high stress was related to greater levels of mental disorders and poor well-being. These findings were consistent with studies from Holton et al. (2016), Wenhua et al. (2016) and Achour et al. (2019), which showed that occupational stress has the most significant effect on mental health and well-being in academics in the higher education sector. Some included studies showed that socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age and employment status significantly influence stress, coping strategies, health and well-being of academics, which aligned with the studies by Kataoka et al. (2014) and Kabito et al. (2020); their studies found that individual factors such as age, gender, education level, teaching experiences, position, and religious can potentially impact on stress in academics.
A few included studies used the TTSC model to study stress, coping styles and health among academics, while the findings of most studies supported the TTSC model that stress has an impact on health and well-being, and coping strategies play a regulatory role in the relationship between the stress and its outcomes.

Strengths and Limitations of the Study
This study contributed to the current understanding of occupational stress, coping strategies, health, and well-being among university academics. The search strategy and database selection were conducted after discussing with the librarian. This review followed a transparent and rigorous methodology, which can enhance the rigorousness of processing, reporting, integrating, and analysing the information. The construction of the results of the included studies was guided by the TTSC, which improve the clearness of the review. However, some limitations need to be considered. Potential selection and extraction bias can be resulted as the data extraction, quality evaluation, and analysis were conducted by one researcher. In the present study, only English language publications were included; some relative and valuable studies in non-English language may be potentially omitted. The present review included a large percentage of quantitative studies because of a lack of qualitative study in occupational stress in academics, which can limit the scope of the review. The dynamic nature of stress cannot be fully evaluated as most studies used a cross-sectional design. Further, recall bias and the risk of common method variance have resulted from the self-reported surveys in most articles. Small sample sizes in some included studies may threaten the generalisability of the findings. Additionally, the generalisability of the results also can be limited by the heterogeneity of tools and design in the studies reviewed. Subsequently, the relations of stress, coping, health, and well-being cannot be conducted easily, because there were only a few studies discussed them. Future research is needed to address these issues.

Implications for Future Research
The construct of the study is dynamic, the sole use of a cross-sectional approach and analysis could limit the scope of the study; employing a longitudinal design would be practical to track the development of occupational stress, coping, health, and well-being of academics. Sources of stress are more subjective, which differed from individuals; using the in-depth interview to collect data of stressors can help to understand the issues at hand and explore more aspects of stress experience from the subjective perception of academics. Guaranteeing an adequate sample size can enhance the ability to generalise the findings. There were few studies that investigated the specific occupational stress related socio-demographic characteristics, maladaptive coping strategies as well as mental health and well-being among university academic staff in the changing society. Their relationship has not been studied holistically. Therefore, a future study can be conducted under the guidance of these gaps.

Recommendations for Practice and Policy
The findings of this review highlight the importance of using adaptive coping styles to deal with stress; thus, advocating a positive approach in dealing with occupational stress is important for academics (Jiang et al., 2017). Higher education institutions need to balance the effort and reward in work according to the stressors of academics and provide adequate resources (Iqbal & Kokash, 2011). Investments and legislation of higher education should be addressed related to the benefits of academics .

Conclusion
This review expanded the current understanding of occupational stress, coping strategies, health, and well-being of academics in higher education. A majority of studies reported academics encountered moderate to high level of stress, and the heavy workload was one of the main stressors. Dealing with stress in work, academics were more likely to use problem-focused coping. Negative approaches such as drinking alcohol and using drugs were reported. Poor mental health and decreased well-being of academics were presented in most studies. Occupational stress can affect the mental health and well-being of academics through negative coping styles and positive coping styles. Socio-demographic characteristics such as gender, age and employment status can significantly influence stress, coping strategies, health, and well-being of academics. Future studies should investigate the specific occupational stress related socio-demographic characteristics, maladaptive coping strategies as well as mental health and well-being among university academics. This study can help to understand the work phenomenon of university academics and improve their health and well-being, which in turn can contribute to satisfaction and productivity within the educational institutes.