Effort-Reward Imbalance Underpins Worker Stress
Effort-reward imbalance led to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, as well as declines in overall physical and mental health
It may be hard to get your brain around abstract models of stress, especially when they don’t line up with the usual fright-or-flight illustrations or seem remediable by the relaxation tips commonly sold as solutions. But if we care about workers, and how employers may be able to help them, we can’t ignore the harmful effects of effort-reward imbalance.
Think back to Psych 101 and you’ll remember that most human transactions are based on our expectation of an even exchange, or social reciprocity. It's like an unwritten contract. We’re hard-wired for evenhandedness, and when we get — or believe we’ve gotten — a raw deal, we suffer from physical and emotional stress.
In the workplace, employees trade their currency — effort — for the employer’s currency, rewards, which include:
compensation
job security and prospects for promotion
respect and prestige within the organization
The balance -- or imbalance -- of effort and reward may be influenced by an employee's motivational style, especially for employees who are intrinsically driven to overextend their effort independent of rewards, often to fulfill their underlying longing for approval. This surfaces as "overcommitment" in the effort-reward imbalance model.
When physical and or mental job effort outweigh the reward — or employees perceive the balance to be out of whack — the result is chronic stress and, over time, the physical and mental problems that stress can lead to.
This understanding of work stress was first conceptualized by medical sociologist Johannes Siegrist.
The model of effort rewards imbalance claims that lack of reciprocity between costs and gains (i.e., high-cost/low-gain conditions), define a state of emotional distress with special propensity to autonomic arousal and associated strain reactions.
— From Johannes Siegrist’s seminal paper, Adverse Health Effects of High-Effort/Low-Reward Conditions
Siegrist’s theory was put to the test in Britain’s classic “Whitehall II Study,” which followed more than 10,000 civil service workers for 11 years. Results showed that effort-reward imbalance led to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, as well as declines in overall physical and mental health. Study subjects who were lower on the organizational chart and those with less workplace social support had the highest levels of risk among those with effort-reward imbalance. Since then, research has shown even more pronounced effects of effort-reward imbalance, especially on the risk of heart disease and depression -- based on rigorous studies of employees in a wide range of occupations working in countries across the globe.
The Whitehall researchers, led by social determinants of health pioneer Sir Michael Marmot, felt their results showed that cardiovascular disease and other stress-related illnesses could be prevented by improving work conditions. Their work led to a campaign to encourage employers to:
Improve rewards by recognizing good job performance
Encourage job-skill and professional development
Increase salaries
Foster social support at the workplace
Siegrist has proposed additional solutions:
Leadership development among supervisors, emphasizing the importance of esteem, recognition and appropriate feedback.
Building upon non-monetary rewards, like flexible work options, more effectively matching job status to achievements, and fostering job security.
Effort-reward imbalance is one of the two most influential frameworks for understanding job stress, alongside the demand-control model of job strain. In fact -- despite our preoccupation with other models that push accountability for stress solely on workers -- regarding both demand-control and effort-reward imbalance, Siegrist wrote in 2014:
Empirical evidence on their health-adverse effects is far broader than is currently the case for any other stress-theoretical model related to work and employment.
Ultimately, most elements of the psychosocial work environment can be plugged into one or both of these models.
Whether effort-reward imbalance is a product of employee perception or actual work conditions remains a topic of debate. Most likely, both play a role. Certainly, job demands and job control have been validated as causes of cardiovascular disease and high blood pressure, in contrast to trendy notions that stress is a mindset or is a good thing and that employees are on their own to address it. The role of personal interventions is to help employees with problem-solving skills that can help them advocate for themselves, assess their level of effort as objectively as possible and, in some cases, moderate overcommitment. Stress management and resilience programs may play a supporting role.
Further Reading
For a good overview of effort-reward imbalance, and researching showing how it leads to cardiovascular disease, see Siegrist's 2010 overview from the International Journal of Occupational Medicine and Environmental Health, Effort-Reward Imbalance at Work and Cardiovascular Diseases.
Siegrist's overview of effort-reward imbalance and depression has not been translated into English, but you can read the abstract here.