Stress management in the workplace in the era of industrial and economic change

Abstract

The globalization of the economy and the recent economic recession in Japan has accelerated down-sizing or restructuring of corporations and has resulted in the induction of a wage system according to achievement instead of the traditional seniority wage system, break-down of the life-long employment system, excess labor and increased unemployment. These rapid changes in the labor situation have increased job stress. It was reported in the survey conducted by the Ministry of Labor in 1997 that 62.8 percent of 16,000 workers had anxiety, worry and stress regarding their working life. The need for effective stress management at work has been increasing in this situation, but in the survey mentioned above only 26.5 percent of 12,000 companies replied that they had incorporated mental health measures. The characteristic features of the approaches for stress management in Japan are summarized as follows: 1) The most popular approaches are education and consultation for individual workers. 2) Systematic preventive approaches such as work control, working environment control, organizational change in the health management system, and systematic and continuous educational programs for managers are inadequate. 3) Systems to evaluation the effectiveness of these interventional approaches are also inadequate. Considering the current situation in which there is increasing job stress and a need for the occupational mental health promotion, we propose a series of mini-reviews regarding stress management at work and mention the composition of this series.