Stress At Work: A Review and Theoretical Framework, II

Abstract

In Part I of this paper we reported the main findings of a survey of the literature on occupational stress. We were particularly concerned to try to estimate the size of the problem of stress at work and, further, to see if different occupational groups experienced different degrees of stress. The oversimplified answers to these questions are that at any one time about eight per cent of the workforce are experiencing some distress and that greater proportions of the lower social classes experience more of it. Repetitive, machine‐minding type tasks appear to be particularly unpleasant and potentially harmful to health and well‐being. These findings were hedged about with reservations on the validity of the measures used and other doubts, and we concluded the paper with the comment that it was difficult to integrate and make sense of all these data without some better definitions of the concepts and a model for delineating the relationships of the concepts. This second part at‐tempts to deal with these two difficulties.