Stress at Work and Well-being Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A 1-Year Longitudinal Study in Switzerland.

OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study is to analyze the development of conditions at work and health-related variables (notably exhaustion) in Switzerland longitudinally before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. METHODS: Questionnaire data were collected from a population-based sample of 1,553 employees in February 2020 and 1 year later. Health and well-being associated with ( a ) working conditions in general and ( b ) COVID-19-specific predictors such as worries about being infected and conditions for working at home were analyzed using analysis of (co)variance and multiple regression. RESULTS: Conditions at work and well-being were stable overall, even indicating slight improvements, notably for men compared with women. Both an index representing stressors and resources at work in general (Job Stress Index) and a COVID-19-related demand index showed consistent effects on health and the effect of COVID-19-related demands was stronger if the Job Stress Index deteriorated than when it improved.

Commuting as a work-related demand: Effects on work-to-family conflict, affective commitment, and intention to quit.

Commuting time is the duration of the transition between the work and private (typically family) domains. The status of commuting in theories dealing with work-family issues or boundary management is not very clear. We discuss commuting taking a different perspective from the literature (e.g., as a demand, source of time-based work-family conflict, impediment to the flexibility and permeability of the work-home boundary, and as a resource for work-family boundary management), concluding that the demand aspects of commuting are dominant. From this perspective, we analyzed the association between the commuting time as a work-related demand at baseline and work-family conflict (WFC), affective commitment (AC), and intention to quit (ITQ) 1 year later (N = 838). We assessed commuting time objectively by using Google Maps to estimate travel time based on postal codes of home and workplace. As expected, longer commuting predicted all three outcomes. Furthermore, autonomy-manifested in flexible work arrangements-moderated these effects for two out of three outcome variables: Temporospatial autonomy reduced the positive associations between commuting time and WFC and ITQ. The effect sizes were small; however, effects were adjusted for baseline levels of the relevant outcome, demographic variables, and several work and private stressors.

Who gains the most from improving working conditions? Health-related absenteeism and presenteeism due to stress at work.

Work stress-related productivity losses represent a substantial economic burden. In this study, we estimate the effects of social and task-related stressors and resources at work on health-related productivity losses caused by absenteeism and presenteeism. We also explore the interaction effects between job stressors, job resources and personal resources and estimate the costs of work stress. Work stress is defined as exposure to an unfavorable combination of high job stressors and low job resources. The study is based on a repeated survey assessing work productivity and workplace characteristics among Swiss employees. We use a representative cross-sectional data set and a longitudinal data set and apply both OLS and fixed effects models. We find that an increase in task-related and social job stressors increases health-related productivity losses, whereas an increase in social job resources and personal resources (measured by occupational self-efficacy) reduces these losses. Moreover, we find that job stressors have a stronger effect on health-related productivity losses for employees lacking personal and job resources, and that employees with high levels of job stressors and low personal resources will profit the most from an increase in job resources. Productivity losses due to absenteeism and presenteeism attributable to work stress are estimated at 195 Swiss francs per person and month. Our study has implications for interventions aiming to reduce health absenteeism and presenteeism.

SOS-Appreciation overboard! Illegitimacy and psychologists' job satisfaction.

In the globalized and rapidly evolving work environment, deficiencies in job design are a common reason that employees must sometimes complete tasks that are not directly connected to their occupational role. Individuals with a clear vision of their occupational role and duties in particular, such as psychologists, might consider such tasks as an offense to self. According to the "Stress-as-Offense-to-Self" (SOS) concept, so-called "illegitimate tasks" do not respect a person's occupational identity-threatening the self through disrespect. We investigated perceived appreciation as an underlying mechanism mediating between illegitimate tasks and reduced job satisfaction after one year through three studies conducted in two European countries. Using data from 50 psychologists who graduated from a German university, Study 1 revealed that perceived appreciation explained the relationship between illegitimate tasks and job satisfaction after one year. Studies 2 and 3 confirmed this finding using data from 67 and 183 Swiss employees working in fields of psychology. In particular, illegitimate tasks affected the perception of appreciation immediately and in the long term, which in turn affected the psychologists' job satisfaction (contagion model). Our results illustrate the importance of perceived appreciation as a mechanism that mediates between illegitimate tasks and job satisfaction of psychologists.

Ten-year trajectories of stressors and resources at work: Cumulative and chronic effects on health and well-being.

Employing 5 waves of measurement over a period of 10 years, we explored the effects of exposure to constellations of conditions at work on physical and psychological strain, estimating the history of exposure over time. Specifically, we first tested if the 4 constellations postulated by the job demand-control (JDC) model, extended to include social stressors, could be identified empirically over time through a person-centered analysis. Second, we tested 2 specific effects of the history of exposure on physical and psychological strain: cumulative effects (i.e., history of exposure predicting strain) and chronic effects (i.e., history of exposure being associated with reduced reversibility in strain). Data were collected from 483 respondents who were at the end of their vocational training. The results supported the hypotheses, in that not all JDC constellations could be empirically identified, the majority of participants was in rather favorable constellations, and the differences between constellations, in terms of levels of demands and control, were more subtle than suggested by theoretically predefined constellations. Because the linear and quadratic solutions were largely comparable, we decided to adopt the linear ones. The expected cumulative and chronic effects were mostly confirmed: Unfavorable JDC constellations were associated with poorer health and well-being than favorable ones, when controlling for the initial level of the respective outcome variable, demographic variables, and for cumulative private stressors (cumulative effects). These differences largely remained after further adjustments for current conditions at work (chronic effects). (PsycINFO Database Record

Testing job typologies and identifying at-risk subpopulations using factor mixture models.

Research in occupational health psychology has tended to focus on the effects of single job characteristics or various job characteristics combined into 1 factor. However, such a variable-centered approach does not account for the clustering of job attributes among groups of employees. We addressed this issue by using a person-centered approach to (a) investigate the occurrence of different empirical constellations of perceived job stressors and resources and (b) validate the meaningfulness of profiles by analyzing their association with employee well-being and performance. We applied factor mixture modeling to identify profiles in 4 large samples consisting of employees in Switzerland (Studies 1 and 2) and the United States (Studies 3 and 4). We identified 2 profiles that spanned the 4 samples, with 1 reflecting a combination of relatively low stressors and high resources (P1) and the other relatively high stressors and low resources (P3). The profiles differed mainly in terms of their organizational and social aspects. Employees in P1 reported significantly higher mean levels of job satisfaction, performance, and general health, and lower means in exhaustion compared with P3. Additional analyses showed differential relationships between job attributes and outcomes depending on profile membership. These findings may benefit organizational interventions as they show that perceived work stressors and resources more strongly influence satisfaction and well-being in particular profiles. (PsycINFO Database Record

Does work stress make you shorter? An ambulatory field study of daily work stressors, job control, and spinal shrinkage.

Body height decreases throughout the day due to fluid loss from the intervertebral disk. This study investigated whether spinal shrinkage was greater during workdays compared with nonwork days, whether daily work stressors were positively related to spinal shrinkage, and whether job control was negatively related to spinal shrinkage. In a consecutive 2-week ambulatory field study, including 39 office employees and 512 days of observation, spinal shrinkage was measured by a stadiometer, and calculated as body height in the morning minus body height in the evening. Physical activity was monitored throughout the 14 days by accelerometry. Daily work stressors, daily job control, biomechanical workload, and recreational activities after work were measured with daily surveys. Multilevel regression analyses showed that spinal disks shrank more during workdays than during nonwork days. After adjustment for sex, age, body weight, smoking status, biomechanical work strain, and time spent on physical and low-effort activities during the day, lower levels of daily job control significantly predicted increased spinal shrinkage. Findings add to knowledge on how work redesign that increases job control may possibly contribute to preserving intervertebral disk function and preventing occupational back pain.