Psychosocial system for work well-being: On measuring work stress by causal pathway

摘要

Work stress that is prone to stimulate challenges can be regarded as 'healthy stress'; and the other kind that leads to distress, hardship or strain can be termed 'unhealthy stress'. It is the unhealthy stress that results in the destruction of an individual's work well-being. Psychosocial work conditions are regarded as critical factors for the functioning of the personnel and organisation and as being responsible for work stress. Thus the present paper seeks to introduce a new measure based on holistic and system modelling approaches to measure the work stress with the help of a work stress index or work well-being index. Work stress is a situation of the failure of individuals' contestability and strength and job-related psychosocial network of the organisation and is measured in terms of work well-being index. To measure the work stress for the psychosocial work condition of an organisation and to identify the predictors for work stress a latent variable structural equation model has been developed using structural equation modelling to measure work well-being. It will provide us with a measurement of work stress in a psychosocial work condition in terms of work well-being. A higher work well-being index will indicate the lower work stress within the psychosocial work condition. Strengths and weaknesses of various components will also indicate that a characteristic of the individual requires extra organisational or social network support to mitigate work stress.