Job Stress in the United Kingdom: Are Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises and Large Enterprises Different?: Job Stress in the United Kingdom

Lai, Yanqing; Saridakis, George; Blackburn, Robert

Abstract

This paper examines the relationships between firm size and employees' experience of work stress. We used a matched employer–employee dataset (Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2011) that comprises of 7182 employees from 1210 private organizations in the United Kingdom. Initially, we find that employees in small and medium‐sized enterprises experience lower level of overall job stress than those in large enterprises, although the effect disappears when we control for individual and organizational characteristics in the model. We also find that quantitative work overload, job insecurity and poor promotion opportunities, good work relationships and poor communication are strongly associated with job stress in the small and medium‐sized enterprises, whereas qualitative work overload, poor job autonomy and employee engagements are more related with larger enterprises. Hence, our estimates show that the association and magnitude of estimated effects differ significantly by enterprise size.

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Dec 3, 2013
• Publication Date: 2015-08
• Deposit Date: Mar 29, 2018
• Journal: Stress and Health
• Print ISSN: 1532-3005
• Publisher: Wiley
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 31
• Issue: 3
• Pages: 222-235
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.2549
• Keywords: SMEs; enterprise size; job stressors; work stress
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/1139848