A number of researchers have accounted for the role of an employee’s personality in their response to stress. This is known as individual differences, which essentially accounts for the unique characteristics an individual has, with potential consequences to how they interact with their environment.
While occupational stressors and job characteristics may have an impact on employee wellbeing, not all employees will react to these stressors in the same way, if at all. The Person-Environment Fit (French and Caplan, 1972) encompasses individual differences and asserts that it is the individual’s interaction with their environment that causes stress in the way that Parkes (1994) argues that the relationship between the individual and the organisation as factors that contribute to stress is non-invariant. Thus, the definition of stress here is subjective and it is the individual’s perception of the stress as a threat that causes psychological strain.
According to the Person-Environment Fit, stress, as a result of work overload, is because the employee does not have the capabilities to manage their workload, while acknowledging that others may be able to manage that level of work with ease. While capabilities are factors that should be accounted for, employee stress is more complex than merely the level of work an individual can manage. Stress arises because the individual perceives it to exceed the amount of coping resources they have. Subjective feelings of overload can give rise to stress, especially if the stress surpasses what the individual believes they can cope with. Individual differences account for the subjective nature of occupational stress and explain the unique ways employees, as individuals, perceive stressful situations, and appraise it as a threat.
The appraisal of the stressor is what triggers an emotional response and these emotional responses differ between individuals. The appraisal gives the context ‘relational meaning’ in that the individual attaches a meaning to the stressor through their unique interaction with it. The relationship the employee has with their working environment is therefore a transactional one in that it is a unique interaction with…
Consultant Occupational and Environmental Medicine
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