Psychosocial risks and work-related stress

Abstract

As a consequence, psychosocial hazards and risks have emerged. According to the ILO definition from 1986, “psychosocial factors at work refer to interactions between and among work environment, job content, work organisation and workers’ capacities, needs, culture, personal extra-job considerations that may, through perceptions and experience, influence health, work performance and job satisfaction”. It is the interaction of all these variables that is recognised as having a potentially hazardous effect on workers’ health(2). Stress researchers have identified nine categories under which psychosocial risks can be grouped: job content; workload and work pace; working hours; participation and control; career development, status and pay; role in the organization; interpersonal relations; organizational culture and home-work interface (3). Work-related stress is the harmful physical and emotional response caused by an imbalance between the perceived demands and the perceived resources and abilities of a person to cope with those demands. This occurs when the demands of the job do not match or exceed the capabilities, resources, or needs of the worker and when the knowledge and abilities to cope of an individual worker or of a group are not matched with the expectations of the organizational culture of an enterprise. As psychosocial risks are determined by work organization and labour relations, most of the causes of work-related stress are associated with how work content is designed and how work is organized.