Psychological Stress in the Workplace (Psychology Revivals)

Terry Beehr

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138012998
• eBook ISBN: 9781317747918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1995, this book was the most up-to-date and comprehensive account of research on occupational stress at the time. It identifies the sources, consequences and treatments of stress in the workplace from the perspective of organizational psychology and makes clear recommendations for future work in this area.

Terry Beehr discusses how role ambiguity and conflict act as stressors in the workplace, and discusses the characteristics of the job and the organization itself that can adversely affect performance. He examines the effects of stress in the workplace and describes methods that can be used to alleviate the problem, both at the individual and organizational level.

In addition, the book is illustrated with many examples from field research over the author's twenty years of experience in studying the workplace. This book will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in occupational psychology, as well as managers and trainers. Terry Beehr is still working in this field today.

Part I

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Introduction to occupational stress

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Occupational stress is studied and treated by many disciplines and these disciplines have tended to define it, study it, and treat it in their own separate ways. In addition to the professions’ treatments of it, stress is now a common word in the English language and the general public has a variety of ways of using the term. It is therefore necessary to define it carefully before any discussion of it. Failure to do this will result in inaccurate communication.

In this section, the terms involved in occupational stress are defined and examined, a theory is described that uses the terms in a consistent way, and a few observations about methods of research are examined for their strengths and weaknesses in studying this topic. Chapter 1 outlines a model describing the program of empirical research and theory development in which my colleagues and I have been engaged for about the last twenty years. The remainder of the book describes that program.

Chapter 1

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The many faces of occupational stress

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Unfortunately his initial studies involving hypoglycemia were unsuccessful because a change in the brain metabolism was only observed when the stress produced death.

(From a letter recommending promotion in academia; Short Subjects, 1990: 8.)

Stress has many faces, perhaps due in part to the interest the topic generates among people with widely varying perspectives. The general public has always used the word stress in some sort of commonsense manner, so that researchers who are new to the topic might already believe they know what it is before examining past research on it. This could lead to operationalizations that are different from existing research. While this might result in innovation, it causes problems when one tries to compare results across studies.

The stress causing a change in brain metabolism noted in the quotation above seems to have come from a biology- or physiology-related study. The incident no doubt caused some stress in the researcher as well as in the research subject. Beehr and Franz (1987) noted that several very different research specializations have a logical interest in stress, albeit for different reasons and from different starting points and assumptions. Because of these various faces of stress, definitions of it vary widely and it is important to remember that any two people talking or writing about the topic may not always be referring to the same thing. This is true of work-related stress and of stress in general. Limiting the topic to work-related or occupational stress does not seem to help reach common definitions.

There is a consensus that job stress is important. Figures are often cited estimating that many billions of dollars are lost in the United States each year due to occupational stress (e.g. Beehr and Bhagat, 1985b). These “losses” are due to increased costs of medical insurance to employers and employees, excess pressure on the medical facilities and professionals who could otherwise work with other patients and illnesses, lost productivity due to illness, and so forth. No accurate estimate of national cost can be made, however. due to two considerations: since there are differing definitions of occupational stress, it is not easy to decide which one to use in making an estimate; and even when a definition is agreed upon, there is usually no clear research that would allow accurate estimates.

At an individual level, if work-related stress causes an individual to be ill, it is certainly important to that individual, however. At a societal level, we know that many illnesses are costing a great deal of money and many of these illnesses are thought capable of being partially caused by a stressful work environment (e.g. coronary heart disease and mental illnesses). In order to estimate the cost to society, however, the proportion of such illnesses that is actually due to stressful working conditions would have to be known. There are no clear estimates of this. More hard data can be found if we look at claims for workers’ compensation. Corey and Wolf (1992) note that through most of the 1980s, there was a 540 percent increase in mental stress claims in California’s worker compensation system, even though work-related injuries as a whole declined during the same period. The cost of these California claims in 1987, for example, was 383 million dollars. It is clear that there are some monetary costs for work-related stress, although the exact price is probably unknowable.

A SAMPLE OF FOUR APPROACHES TO OCCUPATIONAL STRESS

One thing most people agree about is that occupational stress is widespread. Of course, since there are so many different definitions of stress, it might be easy to find it in one form or another in many jobs. Ivancevich and Matteson (1980) even compared stress to sin, since both of these are emotionally charged topics that mean different things to different people. Beehr and Franz’s (1987) analysis concluded that there are at least four broad fields of specialization that approach stress with their own assumptions and using their own research skills and orientations. Since the fields are broad, it is difficult to give precise labels to them, but the following have been suggested: medicine, clinical psychology, engineering psychology, and organizational psychology (Beehr and Franz 1987). Among other things, medicine would include physiological approaches in general, clinical psychology would include counseling and most of the human service oriented fields, engineering psychology would include human factors specialties and some experimental psychology, and organizational psychology would include organizational behavior and management.

To preview the chapter and the book, it can be stated here that my own approach to occupational stress research is the one labeled organizational psychology. Since organizational psychology can be considered the social psychology of organizations (Katz and Kahn, 1978), this book describes an approach that examines the links between social psychological characteristics of the workplace and harmful psychological or physical outcomes for the individual. The workplace characteristics are usually labeled stressors and the individual outcomes are collectively known as strains. The chapters herein are the result of a twenty-year program of research in which these links are examined in a variety of ways and in which other variables are explored for their association with stressors and strains.

Each empirical research project described herein examined slightly different aspects of the organizational psychology approach to job stress, but the one constant was the link between stressors and strains. Subjects of the projects always worked for pay, but there have been a large variety of occupations, from low to high in socioeconomic status, from poorly to richly paid, from those requiring little or no formal education to those requiring doctorates, from both service and manufacturing organizations, from both private and public sector organizations, from both US and foreign sites, and so forth. A few thousand people have participated in these studies at over thirty research sites. The people studied come in all shapes and sizes. That is, they range in age from barely old enough to hold paying jobs to old enough to retire if they wanted, and they are of different races and both sexes. Some of these individual differences have occasionally been a focus of the research, but one interesting overall impression is that the individual differences have generally mattered only a little in reactions to the organizational stressors. That is counterintuitive to most psychologists and we can take that as a challenge for future research to explain.

These studies all fit within the organizational psychology approach to occupational stress and Table 1.1 can provide some perspective on what this means. It lists and describes the nature of these four research approaches. Stressors refer to the characteristics of the person’s work environment that are thought to be causal in the stress process and outcomes refer to the variables thought to be consequences of stress. Strain is a term used for aversive consequences of stress for the person. Primary targets of treatment refer to the type of variable most immediately affected by attempts to treat occupational stress; that is either some aspect of the organization or workplace or some aspect of the individual is usually the immediate focus (primary target) of the treatment process. These are discussed further in Chapter 7. The term “stressor” is not always used in these disciplines, but when it is, it is almost uniformly used to mean a theoretically causal environmental characteristic and that is how it is used in the remainder of this book. The term “strain” is used less often than stressor in these disciplines and its meaning has been a little less consistent when it is used. It usually means, however, an individual’s response that could be deemed harmful to him or her and that is the way it is used here.

It may be noted that the word stress is not used to describe any variable in the table and in fact it will not be used as a name for any single variable in this book. If this seems astonishing, the reason is that stress has been defined so variously in both the scientific and popular literatures that the word itself causes more confusion than clarification when used as a variable name. One study concluded that the public tends to interpret the word stress as a combination of both stress causes and outcomes; that is, both as stressors and strains (Jex et al. 1992). Unfortunately, while researchers may be more precise – that is, each tends to use the word only to mean stressors or strains – they do not agree with each other.

Probably none of the researchers or practitioners in the four fields in Table 1.1 would like the narrow characterization they receive here, but it is instructive to make this characterization in order to show that these themes and approaches to occupational stress tend to proceed relatively independently of each other. It must be acknowledged, however, that people working within each of these disciplines and from each of these perspectives are not always as narrow in their pursuit of knowledge and understanding as they are painted in the following paragraphs.

Medical model approaches have historically focused on physical stressors, for example unusual temperatures or noise, and they have expected these stressors to cause physical strains or outcomes to the individual; for example, hypertension or increases in epinephrine or norepinephrine levels in the blood stream or urine (Beehr and Franz, 1987). When they treat stress, the approach tends to be individual rather than organizational. If hypertension were the strain, the treatment might be medication, which is aimed at the individual’s hypertension; by contrast, the treatment is not usually to change the stressors in the organization or workplace.

Beehr and Franz (1987) argue that the clinical/counseling approach to occupational stress is similar to the medical approach, with the major exception that psychological stressors (rather than physical stressors) and psychological strains (rather than physical strains) are the outcomes of interest. In this approach, direct treatment of individuals’ psychological strains is common. Neither of the approaches above the dotted line in the table was developed with the workplace as the primary focus, but they are now becoming widely applied there. Most employee assistance programs seem to use one or both of these approaches.

Table 1.1 Four approaches to occupational stress (reprinted with permission from Beehr and Franz, 1987)

Approach	Typical stressor	Typical outcome	Typical primary target of treatment
Medical	Physical	Physical strain	Individual
Clinical/Counseling Psychological	psychology	Psychological strain	Individual
Engineering psychology	Physical	Job performance	Organization
Organizational psychology	Psychological	Psychological strain	Organization

The third approach to occupational stress in the table is labeled engineering psychology and it has a longer history of research on work-related stress (Beehr and Franz, 1987). In its work on occupational stress, engineering psychology has traditionally focused on physical stressors such as heat or noise and it has been almost unique among stress researchers in its focus on job performance as an outcome variable.

The final entry in the table is labeled organizational psychology and has always focused historically (although it has a shorter history than the disciplines in the other approaches) on psychological stressors in the workplace and on psychological strains. In this regard, it resembles the clinical/counseling psychology approach to occupational stress. For treatment strategies, however, it recommends changes in the organization or workplace more often than the clinical/counseling approach does (Beehr and Franz, 1987). As noted by Ivancevich and Matteson (1987), organizationally targeted treatments have rarely even been tried; recommendations from this approach to the topic have largely fallen on deaf ears. More attention is given to this issue in Chapter 7.

These four professional approaches to occupational stress can cause confusion and disagreements among researchers, readers of the literature, and applied professionals. Some of the disagreements are simply due to differences in the use of the words as in, for example, the situation in which one person calls an environmental stimulus stress, a second reserves the word stress for the individual’s response to the stimulus, and a third person uses the word stress to mean a topic area of research or practice but not any one specific variable. All of these definitions have been used in the research literature (Ivancevich and Matteson, 1980; Mason, 1975).

If researchers and practitioners are careful to define their own use of the word in each of their projects and if others read carefully and overlook their personal preferences for the use of the word stress, this problem might be overcome. This does not always happen, however. Even if it did, there are more problems with integrating the occupational stress literature than just the definition of the word. As can be seen from the four approaches, there are fundamental differences among people regarding the nature of what is acceptable as evidence of the existence of a stressful situation. The ultimate dependent variable or typical outcome is one of the most crucial elements in occupational stress, and there is disagreement regarding what constitutes evidence for even this. It is not necessarily true, for example, that changes in Table 1.1 outcomes of physical health, psychological health, or job performance coincide with each other, are part of a single global construct, or are caused by similar organizational events or situations. The history of psychology in the workplace has taught one not to make such an assumption without great caution. A prime example is the long-held but apparently incorrect assumption that job satisfaction affects job performance (e.g. Herzberg et al., 1959; Vroom, 1964). One should not assume relationships among the stress outcome variables without good evidence.

The complexity and confusion caused by different technical disciplines approaching the topic very differently is apparent, but aside from these professional definitions, there is yet another approach to operationalizing job stress that occasionally appears in the research literature. That is the practice of letting each individual research participant use their own implicit or explicit definition of stress. This happens when, for example, a questionnaire simply asks respondents to rate t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Orginal Title Page
• Orginal Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Part I Introduction to occupational stress
• Part II Stressors in the workplace
• Part III Outcomes of stress in the workplace
• Part IV Alleviating aversive effects of occupational stress
• Part V Conclusion
• Appendices
• References
• Name index
• Subject Index