Occupational Stress Scale

Description

The Occupational Stress Scale (OSS) was developed by House, McMichael, Wells, Kaplan, and Landerman (1979). It measures the frequency with which employees are bothered by stressful occurrences. The measure con­tains five subscales that assess the extent of occupational stress due to job responsibilities, quality concerns, role conflict, job vs. non-job conflict, and workload.

Reliability

Coefficient alpha values ranged from .59 to .76 for responsibility pressure, and from .56 to. 76 for job vs. non-job conflict (Holder & Vaux, 1998; House et al., 1979). Alpha for quality concerns was .72. Alpha was .70 for role con­flict and .73 for workload stress (House et al., 1979).

Validity

Occupational stress was correlated negatively with social support at work, internal locus of control, and job satisfaction. Stress was correlated positively with role ambiguity, role conflict, and personal discrimination (Holder & Vaux, 1998). The five stress dimensions (responsibility pressure, role conflict, workload, quality concerns, and job vs. non-job conflict) intercorrelated positively. The five dimensions all correlated negatively with job satisfaction and extrinsic job rewards. The five dimensions all correlated positively with employee Type A personality. Workload, quality concerns, and job vs. non-job conflict all correlated negatively with intrinsic job rewards (House et al., 1979).

Source

House, J. S., McMichael, A. J., Wells, J. A., Kaplan, B. H., & Landerman, R. (1979). Occupational stress and health among factory workers. Jour­ nal of Health and Social Behavior; 20, 139-160. Items were taken from text, pp. 157-158. © American Sociological Association. Reprinted with permission.

Items

Responses to the items for responsibility pressure, quality concerns, role conflict, and job vs. non-work conflict are obtained using a 5-point Likert­ type scale where0= not at all, l = rarely, 2 = sometimes, 3 = rather often, and 4 = nearly all the time.

Responsibility pressure items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

  1. Feeling you have too much responsibility for the work of others.
  2. Having to do or decide things where mistakes could be quite costly.
  3. Not having enough help or equipment to get the job done well.

Quality concerns items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

  1. Thinking that the amount of work you have to do may interfere with how well it gets done
  2. Feeling that you have to do things that are against your better judgment
  3. Feeling unable to influence your immediate supervisor’s decisions and actions that affect you

Role conflict items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

  1. Thinking that you’ll not be able to meet the conflicting demands of various people you work with
  2. Not knowing what the people you work with expect of you
  3. Having to deal with or satisfy too many people

Job vs. non-job conflict items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

  1. Feeling that your job tends to interfere with your family life
  2. Being asked to work overtime when you don’t want to
  3. Feeling trapped in a job you don’t like but can’t get out of

Workload items:

(Responses to the following questions code O = never, I = rarely, 2 = some­ times, 3 = fairly often, and 4 = very often.)

  1. How often does your job require you to work very fast?
  2. How often does your job require you to work very hard (physically or mentally)?
  3. How often does your job leave you with little time to get everything done?
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