Individuals exposed to high levels of work stress may have the same health issues as those exposed to secondhand smoke, a new study warns.
Harvard Business School and Stanford University researchers did a “meta-analysis” of 228 studies on workplace stress and found that stress at work is as bad for health as exposure to secondhand smoke.
The Harvard-led team looked at a variety of different job-related stressors believed to adversely impact a person’s health, including their employment status, the number of hours in which they work, whether or not they work shifts, how often work conflicted with family life, job demands, the availability of health insurance, and the perceived level of workplace fairness.
The researchers then measured how those stressors impacted four “health outcomes”: self-rated poor physical health, self-rated poor mental health, physician-diagnosed health problems, and death.
It was found that highly demanding jobs increased the risk of having an illness diagnosed by a doctor by 35 percent, while long work hours increased risk of early death by nearly 20 percent. Fears about losing job increased the odds of adverse health by about 50 percent. The condition of the work environment such as the perceived fairness was also found to have a significant impact on a person’s health.
In fact those who have to deal with conflict in both the family and the workplace may have 90 per cent chance of reporting poor physical and mental health, the study noted.
“When you think about how much time individuals typically spend at work, it’s not that surprising,” said study co-author Joel Goh, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School.
Goh noted that the study should help employers handle their employees well considering the fact that while longer work hours or faster work increase productivity, it impacts negatively on the health of workers.
The study report was recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Behavioral Science & Policy Association.
