The study of stress at work.

Abstract

During the past two decades, the field of occupational stress research has developed a few general themes as the causes of stress, yet it has not yielded a clear conceptualization of the problem. The field has been dominated by a clinical perspective of stress as a psycho-physiological phenomenon that arises from an individual's perception of the balance between environmental demands and response capabilities (8, 1 1, 28, 35, 45). The consequences of stress include physiological, psychological, and behavioral changes, which again are mediated by perceptions. Based on this paradigm, most stress research has focused on individual perceptions and susceptibility, and most interventions have been directed toward individual coping strategies ( 14, 40, 44, 5 1). This emphasis on the individual is quite different from that of most other areas of occupational health. The usual public health approach primary prevention in the workplace is identify and modify dangerous working in order to assure so far as possible every working man and woman in the Nation safe and healthful working conditions (38). Consequently, most occupational health research is oriented primarily toward identifying work­ place that are deleterious (32). The analogous orientation in stress research would be determine what within the workplace could be modified reduce stress for all workers. From a public health perspective, the key issue in the study of stress at work is whether the etiologic dynamics of stress are be found within the workplace or within the worker. Since stress certainly has a multifactorial etiology, investigators have been able formulate, and at least partially validate, substantially different models