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Study material Stress, Health & Sustainable working life
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Stress, Health & Sustainable workinglife
1. Introduction
Trends in working life
- Work has intensified: many are under time pressure, 24/7 connected to their work, global
work, flexible work, work-home balance, telework
- Rising prevalence of burnout: disability benefits due to psychological problems
- Self-management: pressure to have a healthy lifestyle
- Alienating and competitive nature of capitalism: platform economies, self-employment,
decreasing unionization, temporary contracts, precarious work
Demographic changes in the western world:
- Dual-career-families: greater income, but also more challenges with combining work and
other roles in life
- Aging work force
Knowledge work
- Social & cognitive skills
- Life long learning
Occupational health: interdisciplinary partnerships of psychological and occupational health science
professionals seeking to improve the quality of working life, and enhance the safety, health and well-
being of workers in all occupations.
How are models for Human resource management, well-being and performance connected
Mutual gains perspective:
- Mutual gains: HRM practices lead to benefits and performance and also to better well-being
- Behavioural / social exchange perspective
- Positive treatment by organizations must be reciprocated: if employees are treated well, the
employees perform well and pay the organization back in that way
- Conservation of resources: HRM-energy/resources-performance
Conflicting outcomes in HRM, well-being and performance grounded in labour process theory
Labour process theory: management is under constant pressure to reduce costs, improve quality,
raise productivity & profitability and lower unit labour costs. This is at the expense of the workers:
they need to work harder and under pressure. This lowers the well-being of the workers.
However, most evidence is found for the mutual gains perspective.
HRM practices Well-being HRM practices Well-being
+ -
Employee training Employee training
High performance practices + High performance practices
-
Monitoring Monitoring
+ +
Family-friendly work practices Performance Family-friendly work practices Performance
Etc … Etc …
,Stress: a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding
circumstances.
Stress research: History
From physiological/behavioural perspective: all the non-specifically induced changes within a biologic
system in response to an aggressive outside agent, that is the stressor. Stress results from a
disturbance of homeostasis (i.e. the body’s attempt to maintain stable internal environment). Fight-
or-flight as a reaction to stress. Stress research moved from physiological perspectives to research on
the role and importance of the cognition in experiencing stress, the psychological perspectives.
Transaction model of stress: Stress is an interaction of features of
the environment or events that happen (the stressors) and the
individual’s response (psychological, physiological and
behavioural) to the environmental demands, threats and
challenges (strain). In addition, stress is a particular relationship
between the person and the environment that is appraised by the
person as taxing or exceeding his or her resources and
endangering his or her well-being.
Stressful life events stressors can: affect human health in
nonspecific ways and can cause a variety of illnesses.
SLE = events that cause different degrees of social readjustment.
Bridge from research interest in general life stress to work-related
stress.
The top 10 most stressful life events according to the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale
1. Death of a spouse
2. Divorce
3. Marital separation from mate
4. Detention in jail or other institution
5. Death of a close family member
6. Major personal injury or illness
7. Marriage
8. Being fired at work
9. Marital reconciliation with mate
10. Retirement from work
Symptoms of stress are distinguished as physical, psychological and behavioural.
Behavioural
Physical Psychological
Irritability
Fatigue Burnout
Withdrawal behaviours:
Muscular tension Depression
absenteeism, turnover
Headaches Anxiety
Aggression
Heart palpitations Irritability
Low work performance
Sleeping difficulties Pessimism
Impatience
Gastrointestinal problems Overwhelmed &
Disinterest
Dermatological disorders unable to cope
Isolation
Cognitive difficulties
Poor health behaviours
Risk taking
,Stressors: are conditions, situations or events that cause strain. Certain factors that cause people
afford and drain physical resources. These stressors can be temporarily, intermittent or chronic.
Stressors can be divided into stressor types:
- Physical stressors: heat, poor ergonomics, lighting
- Task-related stressors: repetitive tasks, workload
- Role stressors: role ambiguity, inter-role, intra-role
- Social stressors: bullying, conflicts, poor management
- Work schedule-related stressors: long work hours, shift work, availability
- Career-related stressors: unclear or unfair performance evaluation systems, job insecurity
- Stressful change processes: downsizing, merger or acquisition
Work & Health, why should we care? Perceived job insecurity, time pressures, workplaces are not
handling work related stress very well (work affect health negatively). This shows that stress and
occupational health are connected.
Stress affect health by: intestinal problems and sleep disturbances, but also cardiovascular death
especially when there is a effort – reward imbalance.
Societal burden of stress (in terms of costs)
- Direct: medical (hospital admissions, physician fees, medication) and non-medical (insurance,
litigation, travel costs, …)
- Indirect: productivity loss (sickness absence, turnover, presenteeism, …)
- Intangible: pain, suffering, loss of quality of life (willingness to pay?)
Transgenerational burden of stress: prenatal stress is correlated with preterm birth, metabolic
disease, cardiovascular disease and psychopathology. Prenatal exposure to stress causes epigenetic
changes affecting phenotypic expression across generations. Maternal stress relates to problems in
infant, potentially crossing over to the next generation.
Sustainable working life: healthy working life and people are able to keep working until retirement
age. This depends on their structures and routines, salary, community & social support system and
new skills. Healthy work places supporting:
- Work related well-being
- General well-being
- General health
- Practices, policies and initiatives to prevent and minimize stress
Aspects that are key in creating a sustainable working life
- Recovery & work – non-work balance
- Inclusive & diverse workplaces
- Leadership behaviours
- Work content & characteristics
- Meaningful work
Different outcomes, stress has an effect on:
- Individual outcomes
- Organizational outcomes
, - Societal outcomes
Job-demand control support model (Karasek): stress = demand x control Focussing on the psycho
social work characteristics that can cause or buffer stress. Stress emerges as a function of work
demands and job control. So, different combinations of demand an control that are either considered
healthy or unhealthy working conditions. For instance, a high control and high demand then you
experience your work in a nice way as challenging and the control helps to not feel overwhelmed /
stressed. But if you have low control and high demands in your work, this causes stress, since you
don’t have ways to deal with this stress.
At a later state, he also added social support as a third dimension. Low support is a cause of stress
and high support is a buffer for stress.
Job Demands Resources model (Demerouti et al): The basic idea is that job demands lead to strain
reaction. Job demands are considered as stressors which causes strain which then has a harmful
effect on people well-being and organizational outcomes. However, job resources are linked to work
motivation that improve well-being and performance. In this model demands and resources interact,
so they are related to each other and job resources can for example buffer the negative effect of job
demands. It can be seen as to pathways, where resources seem to be more important than demands.
Effect-reward imbalance (Siegrist): The basic idea is that workers experience strain at work if the
rewards they receive are not in balance with the effort they invest in their work. Effort revers to for
example time, energy, working hours, working at odd times and on the reward site are positive
feedback, good salary, appreciation, permanent contract, promotion and job security.
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