Work environment risk factors causing day-to-day stress in occupational settings: a systematic review

While chronic workplace stress is known to be associated with health-related outcomes like mental and cardiovascular diseases, research about day-to-day occupational stress is limited. This systematic review includes studies assessing stress exposures as work environment risk factors and stress outcomes, measured via self-perceived questionnaires and physiological stress detection. These measures needed to be assessed repeatedly or continuously via Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) or similar methods carried out in real-world work environments, to be included in this review. The objective was to identify work environment risk factors causing day-to-day stress.

The search strategies were applied in seven databases resulting in 11833 records after deduplication, of which 41 studies were included in a qualitative synthesis. Associations were evaluated by correlational analyses.

The most commonly measured work environment risk factor was work intensity, while stress was most often framed as an affective response. Measures from these two dimensions were also most frequently correlated with each other and most of their correlation coefficients were statistically significant, making work intensity a major risk factor for day-to-day workplace stress.

This review reveals a diversity in methodological approaches in data collection and data analysis. More studies combining self-perceived stress exposures and outcomes with physiological measures are warranted.