ABSTRACT
Whilst some degree of stress in our lives enhances performance, psychological stress has a detrimental impact on health. Most of us in our working lives have experienced disillusionment at the feeling of being a cog in our organizational wheel, enslaved by demands, low control, the sense of being unrecognized and readily disposable. Alongside our own subjective reflections, social scientists have also grappled to increase understanding of the nature of workers’ negative perceptions of their relationship between themselves and their organizations. As we move into the fourth industrial revolution, the advent of automation and robots push into the foreground the need to redefine relationships between workers and employers. The ‘cog in the wheel’ workplaces in industrialized societies are readily identified by researchers. The next step is to chart the health, psychological, and economic consequences of stressful workplaces, which in turn can enable us to focus on the purpose of this book, the quest to design our future healthier working lives.
