Stress Management at work
July 30th 2011 02:33
Introduction to Occupational Stress
As early as in the 1980’s people in the field of occupational health have already been attempting to define and manage occupational or job stress.
In 1986, Singer et al. conducted an extensive mail and telephone survey that includes the purpose of discovering what an occupational stress means. In the process, they learned that “corporate and labor definitions of occupational stress were widely divergent”. Stress as defined by corporate respondents, was primarily due to maladaptive personal lifestyles of a worker and poor person-environment fits. On the other hand, labor representatives picture stress as the product of organizational conditions that promoted loss of control, work overloading and/ or underloading.
Basing from the above statements, we can infer that the term “stress” had become part of the so-called political rhetoric that allowed each side, an employer or an employee, to choose meaning which may favor his or her promulgated cause.
However to institutionalize the definition of stress (especially in the United States), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) formulated a statement that briefly but firmly categorizes the term “occupational stress” or “job stress”. According to the institute, job stress can be defined as the harmful physical and emotional responses that occur when the requirements of the job do not match the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker (Sauter et al., 1999).
In the above NIOSH definition we can portray stress as a condition that can lead to poor health and even injury. We can also infer that the components of the said definition include worker characteristics and working conditions. The significance of such will be discussed at the later part of this discourse.
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