Daniel C. Ganster

Work Stress and Employee Health A Multidisciplinary Review

Research examining the relationship between work stress and well-being has flourished over the past 20 years. At the same time, research on physiological stress processes has also advanced significantly. One of the major advances in this literature has been the emergence of the Allostatic Load model as a central organizing theory for understanding the physiology of stress. In this article, the Allostatic Load model is used as an organizing framework for reviewing the vast literature that has considered health outcomes that are associated with exposure to psychosocial stressors at work. This review spans multiple disciplines and includes a critical discussion of management and applied psychology research, epidemiological studies, and recent developments in biology, neuroendocrinology, and physiology that provide insight into how workplace experiences affect well-being. The authors critically review the literature within an Allostatic Load framework, with a focus on primary (e.g., stress hormones, anxiety and tension) and secondary (e.g., resting blood pressure, cholesterol, body mass index) mediators, as well as tertiary disease end points (e.g., cardiovascular disease, depression, mortality). Recommendations are provided for how future research can offer deeper insight into primary Allostatic Load processes that explain the effects of workplace experiences on mental and physical well-being.

Social Undermining in the Workplace

An interactive model of social undermining and social support in the workplace was developed and tested among police officers in the Republic of Slovenia. As predicted, social undermining was signi...

Effects of Stressful Job Demands and Control on Physiological and Attitudinal Outcomes in a Hospital Setting

We tested the job demands--job control model of stress with a group of 136 registered nurses. Significant interactions between subjective and objective measures of work load and a measure of perceived control predicting physiological and attitudinal outcomes indicated support for the model. In addition, objectively assessed job demands were significantly associated with blood pressure and cortisol levels. The model also predicted elevations in physiological responses after individuals left work, suggesting that potentially health-impairing reactions to jobs that have high demands and low controllability might carry over to home settings and thus pose a high risk of long-term health impairment. The results have implications for the role of personal control in occupational stress generally and for nurse-management practices specifically.

Social Desirability Response Effects: Three Alternative Models

Three models are developed for the effects of social desirability (SD) on organizational behavior research results. SD can act as (a) an unmeasured variable that produces spurious correlations betw...

Dispositional Affect and Work-Related Stress

Trait negative affectivity (NA) has been asserted to be a factor that spuriously inflates relationships between self-reported stressors and self-reported strain outcomes. We tested this hypothesis with conventional work stress instrument responses and physiological assessments obtained from 311 fire and police department employees. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that NA did not measure a factor in common with measures of subjective strain. Latent-variable structural equations analyses, however, found that estimating the effects of NA on strain significantly attenuated the effects of work stressors. NA had no correlation with physiological stress outcomes. Trait positive affectivity did not attenuate relationships between work stressors and either subjective or objective stress outcomes. Implications for work stress research methodology and recommendations are discussed.

Positive affectivity and negative outcomes : The role of tenure and job satisfaction

In this study, the authors proposed and tested a 3-way interaction among positive affectivity (PA), job satisfaction, and tenure in predicting negative employee outcomes. Specifically, the authors predicted that the relationship between job satisfaction and negative outcomes would be stronger for high PAs and that this relationship would be more pronounced for longer tenured employees. Results support this 3-way interaction in predicting job search behavior, physical health complaints, and counterproductive employee behavior. In particular, the relationship between job satisfaction and negative outcomes was most strongly negative for high-PA individuals with longer tenure. The authors discuss the implications of these results and some directions for future research.

Effects of Social Support, Role Stress, and Locus of Control on Health

The main and interactive effects of social support, work role stressors, and locus of control on three health variables were investigated. It was hypothesized that the buffering effect of social support would prevail for individuals with an internal locus of control, but not for those with an external locus of control. Prior research on this hypothesis was extended by (a) examing a sample of 312 fulltime police officers and firefighters, (b) using a multidimensional locus of control measure, and (c) assessing both long-term outcomes (depression and somatic health complaints) and a short-term strain response (epinephrine excretion). Results suggest that social support has ameliorative effects on depression and somatic complaints. Role stressors appear to exacerbate these same outcomes. Two-way interaction effects suggest that (a) social support may buffer the effect of job stress on somatic complaints and (b) externals may respond more strongly to job stress than internals. Interpretation of the significant three-way interactions suggests that locus of control and social support may jointly determine how workers respond to job stress. The form of the interactions, however, differs depending on whether the outcome represents a short-term alarm reaction or a longer-term health outcome.

The nomological validity of the type A personality among employed adults

The nomological validity of the Type A behavior pattern was explored. The Structured Interview (SI) and a battery of personality trait, physical health, and strain measures were administered to an occupationally diverse sample of 568 workers. Ss were also monitored for physiological reactivity and recovery (blood pressure, heart rate, skin temperature, and electrodermal response) to the SI and a subsequent Stroop Color-Word Conflict Task. A confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that SI scores can be factored into three distinct dimensions. There was considerable overlap in the patterns of personality traits that characterized the Type A components, but only a Hostility dimension was significantly related to physiological reactivity and recovery. The results have implications for distinguishing coronary-proneness from the more traditional Type A conceptualization.

Chronic demands and responsivity to challenge

Certain kinds of arousal in response to challenge situations reflect conditioning that makes one adaptive to task demands. A growing literature implicates chronic stress as a factor degenerating this conditioning. This study investigated the relation between objective occupational demands to which workers were classified for at least 2 years and various indicators of adaptive responsivity to challenge situations. There were consistently significant and negative relations between the occupational exposures and cardiovascular and skin temperature responsivity to the acute challenges administered in the laboratory, the corresponding speed of recovery to baseline after removal of the challenge stimulus, and peripheral catecholamine changes during a work shift.

JOB COMPLEXITY, "TYPE A" BEHAVIOR, AND CARDIOVASCULAR DISORDER: A PROSPECTIVE STUDY

Interview-based measures of “type A” behavior and psychological and task-person indexes of job complexity were obtained from 251 police and fire department employees with sound cardiovascular healt...