Relationship between workplace stress, and job characteristics, individual differences, and mental health

• Main Author: Mark, George M.
• Published: Cardiff University 2008
• Subjects: 158.7
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.584331

The focus of this thesis was on issues surrounding the antecedents, workplace circumstances, and features of individuals that relate to states commonly referred to as stressful, and how these states and characteristics interact in the prediction of mental health and job satisfaction outcomes. The introduction gives a brief outline of the aims and methods of the thesis. This is followed by a literature review that describes how certain work environments can lead to negative outcomes for employee wellbeing. The various definitions of stress are described, as are a number of popular work-stress models and their pros and cons, and the important nature and impact of individual difference variables. Chapter 3 describes a potential future direction for occupational stress research, that combines key features of existing research, which in part forms the rationale for this work. The succeeding chapters describe a series of studies, where the relationships between mental health and satisfaction outcomes, and job characteristics and individual differences, were investigated in populations of nurses, university employees, and the general public. These studies combined and tested key aspects of several theoretical viewpoints in the existing literature, including Demands-Control-Support, Effort-Reward Imbalance, and Transactional stress models, in an effort to develop a new theoretical perspective. A new model of stress takes shape over the course of the work, and is fully tested in the final quantitative study. Many aspects of this model were supported, with a key feature being the formal integration of a role for subjective perceptions of work stress. It is argued that this model could form the basis for future research into work-related stress and individual characteristics. A qualitative interview study is the last piece of research described, which focused on issues related to stress, wellbeing, and individual perceptions in university staff.