Stres na poslu

Although the majority of workers would continue to work, even if they would not need to earn money for living, nature of work in the contemporary society has changed making work a less desirable alternative and retirement a more desirable one. Contemporary society has undergone remarkable changes over the last few decades. The use of information and communication technologies has increased, the service sector has grown, there are more old, female and highly educated employees in the workforce, the global 24-hour economy has developed and the insecurity of employment has increased. Work is becoming increasingly more flexible, performed more often in offices than in industry and agriculture, in teams and in the form of telework, and employees work more with information and clients than with objects. These changes have effected psychosocial work environment creating mental and emotional demands that do not match abilities, resources and needs of workers and lead to increased occurrence of job stress. The studies performed in the USA reveal that between 29% and 40% of workers consider their work to be stressful or very stressful, and The Third European Survey on Working Conditions finds 28% workers from 15 EU countries perceiving their work stressful and affecting their health. In this paper job stress is outlined by means of the NIOSH model of job stress and health (Hurrell & McLaney, 1988). The main job stressors and situational and individual factors that can moderate stress are reviewed. Further, the acute psychological, behavioural and physiological reactions and more chronic health effects are examined that result from stress that is too frequent or too prolonged or too intense. Research on job stress has yielded several general models that explain causes, effects, moderators and mechanism of how work-related stress may influence health. Future research in the field of job stress should explain in more details specific relationships between job characteristics, personal characteristics, behaviour patterns, and health problems. In addition to directing the research to micro-processes and specific relationships, certain methodological changes are necessary. They include collection of data on stress from at least three different domains, use of longitudinal and experimental research designs, and avoidance of attempts to mask a weak study design by the use of sophisticated statistical methods. In the cross-sectional studies the results should be interpreted in accordance with the way data are collected and study is designed, since statistical association does not permit conclusions about causality. The gap between research of job stress, on the one hand, and legislation and practice, on the other, has been reducing in the USA and EU. Thus, in the USA almost half of the big companies provide some form of stress management training for their employees. In the EU the psychosocial risk factors are generally covered in the European framework directive on health and safety at work (89/391/EEC). They are considered more specifically in a recently adopted resolution A4-0050/99. The resolution considers that work must be adapted to people's abilities and needs, and that the prevention of disparity between the demands of work and capacities of workers is necessary in order to retain employees until retirement age. The resolution draws attention to the problems that are not covered in by current legislation such as stress, burn-out, violence and harassment at the workplace, as well as problems such as lack of autonomy at he workplace, monotonous and repetitive work. The importance of ergonomics and the use of new technologies for the improvement of health and safety conditions at the workplace are also noted. Two approaches to stress prevention are compared: the one aimed at changing an individual through stress management training, and the other aimed at reduction of job stressors through organisational change. NIOSH (Sauter & Murphy, 1999), European Agency for Safety of Health at Work (Cox, Griffiths & Rial-Gonzalez, 2000), and European Commision (2001) have recently issued the guidelines that rise awareness about stress of modern work and provide knowledge about measures that can prevent or reduce stress. Some basic procedures for identification of stress, design and implementation of intervention and the evaluation of applied intervention are considered.