The Role Of The Economic Crisis On Occupational Stress And Well Being

Workers experience an increasingly uncertain future and many have been forced to search for jobs in a highly competitive market. In this volume, we call upon the field's leading researchers to examine how economic conditions relate to occupational stress and well being.

øThe global economic crisis of 2008 caused the collapse of the world�s financial institutions, large-scale unemployment, the devaluing of housing stocks leading to mortgage defaults and left many countries in debt, unable to meet their financial obliga

Stress studies are becoming more and more attention nowadays, the financial crisis and recession of 2008 around the world further contributed in increasing higher levels of stress among employees, particularly in the corporate context. Occupational stress is increasing due to globalisation and global economic crisis which is affecting almost all countries, all professions and all categories of workers, as well as families and societies. This Book, The Economic Crisis and Occupational Stress, is focused on showing the economic crisis impact on the behaviour of employees such as absenteeism and the missing hours from the schedule. Moreover, overload work as effect of the employee's fear of being fired led to a worrying change in their physical and psychological health and to a reduced work satisfaction. Stress in an organisation is very common in present day industries. In many job situations, high levels of stress are an integral and largely unavoidable component of the work. The need to cope with complexity, ambiguity, conflict and competing demands is a part of organisational life among individuals occupying different positions. Organisations are often unnecessarily stressful and have a negative impact on individuals physical and mental health. The organisations, to make themselves efficient in utilization of resources, have gone through entire restructuring, layoffs, downsizing, and mergers. This has resulted in unstable employee-employer relationship which has caused a great deal of stress among employees. There is no such thing as a stress-free job in the world. Many organisations want to reduce and prevent the employee stress because they observe that it is a major drain on corporate productivity. Nobody is free from stress and it is not harmful always. In small quantities, stress is good; it can motivate us and help us to become more productive, but too much stress or a strong response to stress can be harmful. In this book all experiences of jobs are discussed which affects human minds and bodies. The book also discusses the risk management at workplace, prevention of stress and instructions to stress management. A perceptive and exhaustive account of how the economic crisis has outspread globally is presented and the reflective psychological impact that this recession has had on the workplace examined. This book will be of important for students and researchers in the social sciences, organisational and social psychologists and practitioners of occupational health.

'Two deep human needs are to master the world and to feel safe and secure. The Great Recession thwarted both needs for millions of people around the world. Cooper and Antoniou's global team of scholars address the psychological, economic, social, and other dimensions of our current crisis while charting paths whereby we can again satisfy these needs. Let us rise above the crisis and follow Aristotle's path to living well and faring well. This book offers a plan for doing so.' James Campell Quick, The University of Texas at Arlington, US An economic recession can affect the aggregate well-being of a population. This highly regarded and timely book shows a significant increase in the mean levels of distress and dissatisfaction in the work place in recent years. In particular, increasing job demands, intrinsic job insecurity and increasingly inadequate salaries make substantial contributions to psychological distress, family conflict and related behaviors. The contributors reveal that the recession has fundamentally altered the way employees view their work and leaders. With employers and employees still facing a continued period of uncertainty, a severe impact on employment relations is a continuing reality. Given the difficult economic times, many people are feeling the pressure to work harder. This book will be valuable for undergraduate students and practitioners in the fields of organizational behavior and human resource management.

Workers experience an increasingly uncertain future and many have been forced to search for jobs in a highly competitive market. In this volume, we call upon the field's leading researchers to examine how economic conditions relate to occupational stress and well being.

This book provides a comprehensive, updated summary of research evidence on the effects of stressful working and employment conditions on workers’ health, as based on one of the worldwide leading theoretical models, effort-reward imbalance. It offers three innovative features that are appealing for research as well as for policy. Firstly, it presents and discusses comparable research findings from different continents, in particular from Japan, China, and Latin America. Secondly, it extends the conceptual framework of research on this topic by analysing associations of work stress with health in a life course perspective, and by linking these associations to the macro-level of national labour and social policies. Thirdly, the book helps to strengthen programs and policies that aim at promoting healthy work locally, nationally, and internationally, by providing solid facts on which such programs can be based.

Anyone who has ever had a job has probably experienced work-related stress at some point or another. For many workers, however, job-related stress is experienced every day and reaches more extreme levels. Four in ten American workers say that their jobs are “very” or “extremely” stressful. Job stress is recognized as an epidemic in the workplace, and its economic and health care costs are staggering: by some estimates over $ 1 billion per year in lost productivity, absenteeism and worker turnover, and at least that much in treating its health effects, ranging from anxiety and psychological depression to cardiovascular disease and hypertension. Why are so many American workers so stressed out by their jobs? Many psychologists say stress is the result of a mismatch between the characteristics of a job and the personality of the worker. Many management consultants propose reducing stress by “redesigning” jobs and developing better individual strategies for “coping” with their stress. But, these explanations are not the whole story. They don’t explain why some jobs and some occupations are more stressful than other jobs and occupations, regardless of the personalities and “coping strategies” of individual workers. Why do auto assembly line workers and air traffic controllers report more job stress than university professors, self-employed business owners, or corporate managers (yes, managers!)? The authors of Work and Mental Health in Social Context take a different approach to understanding the causes of job stress. Job stress is systematically created by the characteristics of the jobs themselves: by the workers’ occupation, the organizations in which they work, their placements in different labor markets, and by broader social, economic and institutional structures, processes and events. And disparities in job stress are systematically determined in much the same way as are other disparities in health, income, and mobility opportunities. In taking this approach, the authors draw on the observations and insights from a diverse field of sociological and economic theories and research. These go back to the nineteenth century writings of Marx, Weber and Durkheim on the relationship between work and well-being. They also include the more contemporary work in organizational sociology, structural labor market research from sociology and economics, research on unemployment and economic cycles, and research on institutional environments. This has allowed the authors to develop a unified framework that extends sociological models of income inequality and “status” attainment (or allocation) to the explanation of non-economic, health-related outcomes of work. Using a multi-level structural model, this timely and comprehensive volume explores what is stressful about work, and why; specifically address these and questions and more: -What characteristics of jobs are the most stressful; what characteristics reduce stress? -Why do work organizations structure some jobs to be highly stressful and some jobs to be much less stressful? Is work in a bureaucracy really more stressful? -How is occupational “status” occupational “power” and “authority” related to the stressfulness of work? -How does the “segmentation” of labor markets by occupation, industry, race, gender, and citizenship maintain disparities in job stress? - Why is unemployment stressful to workers who don’t lose their jobs? -How do public policies on employment status, collective bargaining, overtime affect job stress? -Is work in the current “Post (neo) Fordist” era of work more or less stressful than work during the “Fordist” era? In addition to providing a new way to understand the sociological causes of job stress and mental health, the model that the authors provide has broad applications to further study of this important area of research. This volume will be of key interest to sociologists and other researchers studying social stratification, public health, political economy, institutional and organizational theory.

In much of the contemporary research on occupational stress and well-being, demographic factors such as gender, age, and race/ethnicity are evident in the background and controlled in statistical analysis. This volume asks whether that should be the case and the extent to which those demographics impact our experience of stress and well-being.