Occupational stress is the harmful physical and psychological response that occurs when job demands exceed the worker's resources or capacity to cope. The dominant frameworks — Karasek's Job Demands-Control model, Siegrist's Effort-Reward Imbalance model, and Bakker and Demerouti's Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model — all converge on the idea that stress results from an imbalance between what the job requires and what the worker has available. Chronic exposure to high demands with inadequate resources leads to strain outcomes including burnout (emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, reduced personal accomplishment), anxiety, depression, cardiovascular disease, and impaired job performance. Burnout, conceptualized by Maslach, is the most studied occupational stress outcome and represents the endpoint of prolonged, unresolvable work stress.
Work is a major source of both meaning and misery. Occupational stress research examines when and why the balance tips toward misery — and what can be done about it. The field has evolved from studying individual vulnerability (what makes some people more stress-prone?) to studying the work environment (what features of jobs produce stress regardless of who occupies them?), reflecting a broader shift toward recognizing that stress is fundamentally a person-environment interaction.
Karasek's Job Demands-Control (JDC) model, introduced in 1979, was the first influential framework. It proposes that strain results from the combination of high job demands (workload, time pressure) and low job control (autonomy, decision latitude). The most toxic combination — high demands with low control — characterizes "high-strain" jobs associated with cardiovascular disease, depression, and musculoskeletal problems. The model also predicts "active" jobs (high demands, high control) that are challenging but not health-damaging because workers can use their autonomy to manage the demands. Johnson later added social support as a third dimension, creating the Demand-Control-Support model.
The Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model, developed by Bakker and Demerouti, generalized this logic beyond demands and control to any job demands and any job resources. Demands include physical workload, time pressure, role conflict, emotional labor, and work-home interference. Resources include autonomy, social support, performance feedback, skill variety, and career development opportunities. The model's power lies in its flexibility — it can be applied to any occupation by identifying the specific demands and resources relevant to that context. The dual-process structure (demands → burnout pathway; resources → engagement pathway) explains why employees can simultaneously experience exhaustion and engagement when demands and resources are both high.
Burnout, the signature outcome of chronic occupational stress, was identified and defined by Maslach in the 1970s through her research on human service workers. The three components — emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and reduced personal accomplishment — form a syndrome that typically develops over time. Emotional exhaustion is usually the first component, arising from chronic overload. As exhaustion deepens, workers protect themselves through depersonalization — a cynical, detached attitude toward the people they serve. This detachment eventually erodes the worker's sense of personal accomplishment. Burnout is not simply "being tired" — it represents a fundamental breakdown in the relationship between the person and their work.
Intervention strategies operate at three levels. Primary interventions change the work itself — redesigning jobs to reduce unnecessary demands, increasing autonomy, improving management practices, and ensuring adequate staffing. Secondary interventions build individual resilience — stress management training, mindfulness programs, cognitive-behavioral techniques. Tertiary interventions treat employees already suffering — employee assistance programs, counseling, return-to-work rehabilitation. Research consistently shows that primary interventions are most effective because they address root causes, but they are also the most organizationally disruptive and therefore the least commonly implemented. The challenge for I-O psychologists is persuading organizations to move beyond teaching individuals to cope and toward creating work environments that do not require heroic coping.