Work And Stress

Questions about the causes or sources of work stress have been the subject of considerable research, as well as public fascination, for several decades. Earlier interest in this issue focused on the question of whether some jobs are simply more inherently stressful than others. Other questions that soon emerged asked whether some individuals were more prone to stress than others. The Handbook of Work Stress focuses primarily on identifying the different sources of work stress across different contexts and individuals.

Sociologists and health experts from the U.K., Scandinavia, Australia, and the U.S. discuss issues surrounding stress in the workplace, including its causes and ways in which jobs can be designed to minimize it. The book is intended for professionals and students in occupational health and safety.

Occupational health psychology (OHP) involves the application of psychology to improving the quality of work life and to promoting and protecting the safety, health and well-being of employees. Achieving these aims requires researchers and practitioners to possess in-depth knowledge of the processes that are presumed to bring about the desired outcomes. To date, most studies in OHP have relied on cross-sectional designs in examining these processes. In such designs all variables of interest are measured simultaneously. Although this has generated useful insights in how particular phenomena are associated, such designs cannot be trusted when it comes to drawing causal inferences: association is not causation. This book therefore focuses on longitudinal research designs in OHP, whereby the concepts of interest are measured several times, offering much stronger evidence for causal relationships. The authors focus on design issues in longitudinal research (such as the number of measurements chosen, and the length of the time lags between these measurements), and illustrate these issues in the context of applied research on topics such as the work-family interface, conflict at work, and employee well-being. By doing so this volume provides a state-of-the-art overview of current research in OHP, both in terms of its findings and methodologies. This book is based on a special issue of the journal Work & Stress.

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.

In the years following World War II the health and well-being of the nation was of primary concern to the British government. The essays in this collection examine the relationship between health and stress in post-war Britain through a series of carefully connected case studies.

Work-related stress and resulting sickness absence costs the UK economy about £3.7 billion every year (HSE research). In this jargon-free guide, Jeremy Stranks explains what stress is and what causes it, how people respond to stress and cope with it, how stress can be evaluated and managed and what employers’ legal responsibilities are. Written for managers, HR professionals and safety reps, the emphasis of this book is strongly on practical advice and solutions. The author provides simple tools to measure and assess stress and shows how to deal with a range of stress-creating workplace situations, such as bullying, harassment and violence at work. The book also details how to implement a stress management system that complies with the new HSE Management Standards to avoid civil claims and criminal sanctions by the enforcement agencies. End of chapter key points draw out the implications of the preceding text for the employer and an executive summary shows the main aspects that senior management have to be aware of. In addition, the book contains forms and templates to help with managing stress. These are also available for download on the companion website. Stress at Work will also be a valuable reference for students on the following courses as part of modules concerned with Human Factors: NEBOSH Certificate and Diploma courses, MSc courses in Occupational Health and Safety Management, IOSH Managing Safely, British Safety Council diploma and NVQ level 3 and 4 courses in Occupational Safety and Health. Jeremy Stranks has 40 years of experience in occupational safety and health enforcement, management, consultancy and training. He is a founding member of NEBOSH and has lectured on numerous training courses on all aspects of health and safety. His company Safety and Hygiene Consultants offers companies advice in drawing up Health and Safety policies, writing risk assessments and audit procedures.

We are facing an epidemic of work stress. This study combines a critique of the scientific evidence relating to work stress, with an account of the social, historical and cultural changes that produced this phenomenon.

This edited collection explores different strands of social constructionist theory and methods to provide a critique of the prevailing discourse of work stress, and introduces a radical new approach to conceptualizing suffering at work. Over the last three decades, stress and other forms of suffering at work (including burn-out, bullying, and issues relating to work-life balance) have emerged as important social and medical problems in Western countries. However, stress is a contested category, not (as many argue) a well-defined clinical, biological and psychological state that affects people in the same way in different cultures and at different times. Thus, a social constructionist perspective helps to shed light on new approaches to prevention and interventions of work stress. This book will be of great interest for students and scholars of sociology, anthropology, social history, history of science, psychology, communication and management, as well as to practitioners (doctors and psychologists), policy makers and employers.