ABSTRACT
In the organizational sciences there has been a burgeoning interest in the role of time in organizationally-relevant variables (Mitchell & James, 2001). One topic in organizational research where the passage of time is paramount is the association between chronic workplace stressors (i.e. working conditions that are indefinite in duration) and employee psychological and physical well-being (i.e. strain). It is often stated that longitudinal designs are preferable to cross-sectional designs in organizational research because the research questions usually involve change. Longitudinal designs are seen as the best way to address such questions about change (Bono & McNamara, 2011). Despite this
LONGITUDINAL RESEARCH IN OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
emphasis on longitudinal research, surprisingly little is known about how workplace stressor-strain relations vary across time and the accompanying theoretical implications. Perhaps equally important, it is not clear how reliable or consistent the results have been in longitudinal stress research and the sample sizes needed for reasonable power to detect such effects. In this manuscript, we inductively examine these issues by quantitatively reviewing longitudinal research on occupational stressor-strain relations and discussing the theoretical and methodological implications of the pattern of results across studies. This is the first quantitative review of these effects to our knowledge.
