Conditions to design jobs with limited stress and maximum learning opportunities

What is it about?

The European situation of new forms of work organisation and stress risks in jobs are described against the 'decentralisation-human factor orientation model', which discerns types of work organisation. 'Flexible firms' based on lean production have the highest probability of high strain jobs, predicting negative health effects. Among European employees, those working in high strain work organisations report the highest number of complaints with musculoskeletal problems, allergies and asthma and stress-related problems. Although new forms of work organisation are limited in occurrence, most of them tend towards lean production, indicating growing stress risks for employees. The authors suggest to reduce stress risks in jobs by redesigning those organisational conditions labelled as sources for these risks into work situations with a better balance in job demands and job control.

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Why is it important?

Stress at work is too often 'individualized' as personal 'failure' or lack of qualifications. This research tells us that organizational conditions are the root cause of stress for people. Stressful situations related to problems at work are not problematic in themselves, only when employees lack the autonomy to solve these problem by themselves. This can be arrived at by organizational and job redesign, instead of providing employees solely stress management or mindfulness courses.

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