Dunseath, Jennifer; Beehr, Terry a., and King, Daniel W.

This paper particularly looks at workplace stress in public service workers, and makes the important point, one that has been left out of many other papers, that a person's network of friends and family for support can ease the effects of workplace stress considerably. The authors concluded that the quality of a person's social supports will have a significant impact on how they cope with work-related stress. It seems likely that the opposite would be true as well. If a worker was experiencing significant stress at work and at home, for instance from a rocky marriage or other very significant personal stress, social support might not be as helpful. Friends might provide support for the stresses of being in a failing marriage over difficulties at work. This article also did not take workers' overall mental health into consideration.

The authors' findings of the importance of having social supports are intriguing, given all the articles, such as the one by Pretrus and Kleiner, listing all the things employers can do to ease workplace stress. Other research has demonstrated that a certain amount of stress is inevitable and may even be good if not at too high a level, however. It's not really realistic to expect that any workplace could be completely stress-free. Such an environment might be accompanied by a company that lacked focused goals and deadlines. Such a situation might be so loose that it becomes difficult to get things accomplished in a timely way.

The individuals in this study listed stressors (as categorized by the authors) including general life stress, role conflicts, amount of work, how well their skills were used and a variety of other factors that could be present in any job. The fact that they worked in the public sector was not a target variable but simply clarified where the respondents worked.