ABSTRACT

During the past 30 years, growing scholarly interest has been dedicated to the study of occupational stress. Such interest should not be surprising, given the unfavorable effects of occupational stress on the well-being of individual workers and their employers. Indeed, stressful work situations have been linked to a number of indices of psychological and physical illness (Beehr, 1995; Cooper, Dewe, & O’Driscoll, 2001). Furthermore, because of expenses associated with employee absences and health insurance claims, occupational stress has been estimated to cost U.S. companies US$300 billion annually (Rosch, 2001).