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The Most Frequently Cited Article of the 1970s
Job Stress, Employee Health, and Organizational Effectiveness: A Facet Analysis, Model, and Literature Review
Job stress (and more generally, employee health) has been a relatively neglected area of research among industrial-organizational psychologists. The empirical research that has been done is reviewed within the context of six facets (i.e., environmental, personal, process, human consequences, organizational consequences, and time) of a seven facet conceptualization of the job stress-employee health research domain. (The seventh facet, adaptive responses, is reviewed in the forthcoming second article of this series.) A general and a sequential model are proposed for tying the facets together. It is concluded that some of the major problems of the research in this area are: confusion in the use of terminology regarding the elements of job stress, relatively weak methodology within specific studies, the lack of systematic approaches in the research, the lack of interdisciplinary approaches, and the lack of attention to many elements of the specific facets.
Occupational stress or job stress has been studied intensively in I-O psychology for less than 2 decades. It has many definitions, but research under that label usually is concerned with the negative effects of the workplace environment, sometimes in conjunction with the employee's own characteristics, on an employee's health and well-being (Beehr, 1995). Instead of the word "stress" representing a variable, therefore, it is a field (Kahn & Byosiere, 1992, p. 571) or an area of study and practice concerning the relationships among work environment stimuli and unhealthy responses of the people working there.
Given that the Beehr and Newman (1978) article is frequently cited, the editor asked me to reflect on the article and reasons for its impact. One factor was probably that it was the first of a set of two articles published in Personnel Psychology, the lead articles of consecutive issues. The second article was a literature review of ways of coping with or treating occupational stress. Because we found very little rigorous research on occupational stress treatments at that time, we entitled the second article "A Review of Research and Opinion" (Newman & Beehr, 1979). That second article was the first to cite the Beehr and Newman article, and so we gave ourselves our first...