Getting the measure of workplace stress
In response to the growing demands to know how best to measure stress in the workplace, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has commissioned the first ever major review of measures of workplace stressors (ie, measures of those aspects of characteristics of jobs, such as workload or lack of control, which, when present at excessive levels, are believed to lead to poor psychological or physical health).
In a paper presented at the British Psychological Society Occupational Psychology Conference recently, researchers provided findings from the first ever large scale review of stress measures. They highlight the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to measuring stress and discuss the implications for organisations trying to measure and tackle workplace stress.
The research was undertaken by a team of independent organisational psychologists led by Dr Jo Rick from the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and Dr Rob Briner from Birkbeck College, University of London. The study developed a set of rigorous standards that were used to evaluate over 25 different stress measures widely used in UK organisations. The findings of the review were surprising in a number of ways: The amount and quality of evidence about different measures was quite limited. There was only sufficient evidence to provide a detailed analysis for five measures. This lack of evidence suggests that many stress measures have not been adequately developed and that in many cases we do not know if these instruments are accurately measuring stress.
