Economic Stress and Occupational Health

Abstract

Economic sources of stress are some of the most pervasive and significant in adults’ working lives. However, while the link between economic stress and health is well established, some forms of economic stress have received disproportionately less attention than they warrant in organizational psychology and organizational behavior scholarship. In this review, we identify five important domains of economic stress: financial stress, financial deprivation, unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity. We review each area of literature, focusing on its antecedents, theoretical mechanisms, and consequences. We then highlight an emerging body of research that studies economic stress as a multilevel phenomenon and present a framework for economic stress interventions that discusses primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions at the individual, organizational, and community levels. We conclude by identifying several important directions for future economic stress research.