Chapter 16

Question 1

What are stress management interventions?

Answer 1

Any activity, program, or opportunity initiated by an organization, which focuses on reducing the presence of work-related stressors or on assisting individuals to minimize the negative outcomes of exposure to these stressors

Question 2

What are primary interventions?

Answer 2

Long term approaches that aim to eliminate, reduce or alter stressors at work

Question 3

What are secondary interventions?

Answer 3

Aim to reduce or eliminate the effects of stress in employees who are showing signs of stress, by modifying or changing their stress response

Question 4

What are tertiary interventions?

Answer 4

Focus on treating employees with serieus stress-related health problems by providing professional medical treatment

Question 5

What are individual interventions?

Answer 5

Seek to increase the physical and psychological capacity of the individual to enable him to adapt to the stressful situation -> E.g., meditation, exercise

Question 6

What are organizational interventions?

Answer 6

Referred to as stressor reduction processes and aim to reduce stress on a macro level -> E.g., job redesign

Question 7

The intervention literature shows that work-stress programs are mostly focused on individuals instead of organization-directed strategies. What are the reasons for this?

Answer 7

• Lack of senior management involvement; management are inclined to blame the individual
• Professionals feels more comfortable changing individuals than whole organizations
• Limited evidence that intervention in the psychological work environment will reduce mental health problems
• At the moment we are not sure yet how change occurs during organizational interventions, hence difficult to predict if the organizational intervention will be succesful

Question 8

What is the three-phase model for occupational health and safety interventions?

Answer 8

This is a model that comprises the development, implementation and evaluation phase of an intervention.

• Development phase: aims to produce knowledge that can be used to develop interventions
• Implementation phase: evaluates the intervention implementation process, e.g., describes what types of changes were implemented
• Evaluation phase: demonstrate whether the intervention was successful in reducing the prevalence of adverse work factors

Question 9

Several elements are crucial for the success of interventions, what are these elements?

Answer 9

• Comprehensive interventions
• Use of participative approaches; e.g., PAR involves workers participating in the intervention
• Implementation framework; the success of the intervention depends on the implementation process and the activity that is implemented
• Assessing risks, the needs and the context; a strong evidence base and an assessment of the needs to ensure that the right problems are targeted by the intervention
• Strong commitment and clearly defined roles; the stakeholders identified have clearly defined roles

Question 10

Explain the psychosocial safety climate theory (PSC)

Answer 10

The theory seeks to assess day-to-day management of work stress within an organization. Workplaces that have high levels of PSC would be healthy workplaces. PSC measures provide information about what to change in an organization at the primary and secondary level.