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Individual and Nomothetic Models of Job Stress: An Examination of Work Hours, Cohesion, and Well‐Being 1
Author(s) -
Bliese Paul D.,
Halverson Ronald R.
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1996.tb02291.x
Subject(s) - nomothetic , nomothetic and idiographic , psychology , perspective (graphical) , social psychology , cohesion (chemistry) , perception , occupational stress , mathematics , chemistry , geometry , organic chemistry , neuroscience
Many models of job stress are implicitly based on the assumption that there is considerable variability in how individuals perceive and respond to their environments. In this paper, we introduce a nomothetic perspective of job stress. The nomothetic perspective assumes that despite individual differences there will be consistencies in how groups of individuals perceive and respond to similar work environments. To contrast the individual and nomothetic perspectives, we analyzed data from 7,382 respondents from 99 groups. In the analyses, we examined individual‐and group‐level relationships using both real groups and randomly formed groups. The results revealed that respondents from the same work group agreed about perceptions of the work climate. The results also revealed that both individual and nomothetic perspectives were useful in describing the relationship between cohesion and psychological well‐being. The relationship between work hours and psychological well‐being, however, was best modeled from a nomothetic perspective.