Psychosocial risk factors at the workplace: is there enough evidence to establish reference values?

Job control and its effect on public health In the past two decades, research on workplace psychosocial risk factors has produced a large body of theoretical and empirical research.1 An extensive range of health end points, especially cardiovascular diseases,2 have been associated with the psychosocial work environment. Two main job stress models: the demand-control-social support 3, 4 and the effort-reward imbalance 5 are being widely used in occupational health research, although a significant and valuable theoretical and methodological amount of criticism has also been raised.6, 7 Both models try to explain the effects of workplace psychosocial risk factors on health in terms of the interaction among their different dimensions, as well as independently from each other: mainly job control and job demands in the first, and intrinsic and extrinsic efforts and reward in the last. Conceptual and empirical overlap between both models has been remarkable and a call for a unified model has been suggested.8 One important distinction is that the demand-control model attempts to capture features of work organisation while the effort-reward imbalance model attempts to capture work …