Wellbeing@work: Is buffering stress enough?

A recent study on stress among hospital employees in emergency rooms (ER) conducted in 19 hospitals in the Netherlands showed that, regardless of their positions and level of responsibility as doctors or nurses, employees had substantial levels of psychosocial overloads with 47 percent of them scoring high on burnout indicators. This chapter presents examples to express the sense of urgency that stress and burnout has in the workplace because high level of burnout is predictive of longer-term illness. Today stress is a serious issue in the workplace in all sectors because of the consequence and negative impact on the wellbeing and personal lives of workers, and the performance and productivity of organizations and the workforce. Job demands are aspects of work that require physical, cognitive and emotional effort, including time pressure, work overload, role ambiguity, and conflict. Job resources are aspects that expedite achievement of an employee's work goals induced by energy and personal growth.