Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT The objective was to investigate the relationship between occupational stressors (job demands, discretion and interpersonal conflicts) and strain (job satisfaction and mental health); and the impact of two potential moderating variables: work motivation (intrinsic versus extrinsic) and social support from colleagues, supervisors, friends and families. Using random sampling procedures, we home-interviewed 300 working adults living in Kaohsiung city, Taiwan. Intrinsic work motivation was positively related to overall job satisfaction, whereas extrinsic motivation was positively related to depression; both supervisor's support and family support were negatively related to depression, anxiety, and somatic symptoms; the interaction between work demand and extrinsic motivation, and that between work discretion and intrinsic motivation were predictive of somatic symptoms and anxiety, respectively.
Introduction
Stress has become one of the most serious health issues of the twentieth century-a problem not just for individuals in terms of physical and mental disability, but for employers and governments who have started to assess the financial damage. Matteson and Ivancevich (1987) estimate that stress causes half of absenteeism, 40% of turnover, and 5% of total lost productivity due to preventable occupational stress ($300 billion for the US economy annually). Occupational stress has serious consequences for both individual employees and organisations.
The problem of occupational stress is particularly relevant for countries undergoing enormous economic and social change. Taiwan is one such society, with transformation of the industrial structure from labour-intensive to technology-intensive, as well as rapid Westernisation in both work and life styles. In this context, it is important for psychologists, occupational physicians, managerial executives and even government policy-makers to understand the problem of occupational stress, and to produce practical guidelines and interventions to enhance employees' well-being.
The literature on occupational stress indicates that the understanding has evolved from simple stressor-strain models to more sophisticated frameworks incorporating mediating or moderating variables. However, Karasek's occupational stress model (1979, 1980) is still popular. After analysing job descriptions from two large surveys in Sweden and America, Karasek identified two uncorrelated scales. One of these was concerned largely with sheer quantity of work ('demand'); while the other was concerned with the degree of control (or 'discretion') that the person exercised over the task. Further research has found that each dimension was independently related to indicators of strain. For...