Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life

With all the evidence that has accumulated in the past three decades, why is American industry so slow to get the message that there is a proven link between work design and productivity? Robert Karasek and Tores Theorell, in their new book, Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life, have now added to this evidence.

Stress, Karasek and Theorell point out, appears to be taking a heavy toll on employees. Workers' compensation claims related to stress have tripled since 1980. Losses to the U.S. economy associated with job stress are currently estimated to be as large as $150 billion a year. Americans born in the last thirty years are, according to the authors, one of whom is a physician, more than three times as likely to experience depression as were their grandparents. The authors conclude that we are being forced "to trade off our psychological well-being for material affluence ..."

The basic premise of this book--like that of its predecessors in the literature--is that it need not be so. The cure for this distress lies in the transformation of the workplace. If such a transformation does not take place, "then we may be in the process of creating even more stressful environments--now on a global scale--that are totally incompatible with human physiological capabilities."

Co-author Karasek has developed a model to identify job conditions that point to increasing stress or to psychological well-being. There are two factors on the quadrant: psychological demands of the work and decision latitude (control).

The authors argue that the most serious psychological strains--such as fatigue, anxiety, depression, and physical illness--occur when the psychological demands of the job are high and the employee's control over the work is low. A common example is the fast-moving assembly...