Work Stress and Alcohol Use

Alcohol Research & Health, Winter, 1999 by Michael R. Frone

Employees who drink heavily or who abuse or are dependent on alcohol can undermine a workforce's overall health and productivity. To better understand the reasons behind employee abusive drinking and to develop more effective ways of preventing problem drinking in the workforce, researchers have developed a number of paradigms that guide their research. One such paradigm is the alienation/stress paradigm, which suggests that employee alcohol use may be a direct or indirect response to physical and psychosocial qualities of the work environment. Although in the alcohol literature, work alienation and work stress traditionally have been treated as separate paradigms, compelling reasons support subsuming the work-alienation paradigm under a general work-stress paradigm. Researchers have developed several models to explain the relationship between work stress and alcohol consumption: the simple cause-effect model, the mediation model, the moderation model, and the moderated mediation model. Of these, the moderate d mediation model particularly stands out, because it simultaneously addresses the two fundamental issues of how and when work stressors are related to alcohol use. Recent research supports a relation of work-related stressors to elevated alcohol consumption and problem drinking. Future research should focus on the relation between work stressors and alcohol use among adolescents and young adults, because they are just entering the workforce and are the most likely to engage in heavy drinking. Longitudinal studies also are needed to better explain the relation between work stress and alcohol use. KEY WORDS: employee; work related factor predisposing to AODU (AOD [alcohol or other drug] use, abuse, and dependence); alienation; psychological stress; workplace context; theoretical model; problematic AOD use; social role; literature review

Employee alcohol use [1]--whether or not it occurs on the job--is an important social policy issue, because it can undermine employee health as well as productivity. From a managerial perspective, the specific problems created by alcohol or other drug (AOD) use may include impaired performance of job-related tasks, accidents or injuries, poor attendance, high employee turnover, and increased health care costs (e.g., Ames et al. 1997; Dawson 1994; Frone 1998; Martin et al. 1994; Normand et al. 1994; Roman and Blum 1995). These outcomes may reduce productivity, increase the costs of doing business and, more generally, impede employers' ability to compete effectively in an increasingly competitive economic environment. It is therefore nor surprising that alcohol researchers, as well as researchers in the management and economics fields, take considerable interest in the factors that cause or explain employee alcohol use.

The literature on the causes of employee alcohol use generally takes one of two perspectives. The first perspective views the causes of employee alcohol use as external to the workplace. In other words, an employee may have a family history of alcohol abuse that leaves him or her vulnerable to developing drinking problems, have personality traits reflecting low behavioral self-control that make it difficult to avoid alcohol, or experience social norms and social networks outside work--such as friends who drink heavily--that affect drinking behavior (e.g., Ames and Janes 1992; Normand et al. 1994; Trice and Sonnenstuhl 1990).

Although external factors clearly influence employee drinking habits, a second perspective views the causes of employee alcohol use as arising, at least in part, from the work environment itself. This perspective can be further disaggregated into several narrower paradigms. Although researchers differ somewhat in how they label and categorize those narrower paradigms (for reviews, see Ames and Janes [1992] and Trice and Sonnenstuhl [1990]), three versions appear consistently in the literature:

* The social control paradigm suggests that alcohol use may be higher among employees who are not integrated into or regulated by the work organization. Thus, two important risk factors in the social control paradigm are low levels of supervision and low visibility of work behavior (Trice and Sonnenstuhl 1990).

* The culture/availability paradigm suggests that work settings where alcohol is physically or socially available may promote alcohol use among employees (Ames and Grube 1999; Ames and Janes 1992; Trice and Sonnenstuhl 1990).

* Physical availability of alcohol at work is defined as the ease with which alcohol can be obtained for consumption on the job, during breaks, and at work-related events (Ames and Grube 1999). Social availability of alcohol at work is defined as the degree to which fellow workers support drinking either off or on the job (Ames and Grube 1999; Ames and Janes 1992; Trice and Sonnenstuhl 1990).

* The alienation/stress paradigm suggests that employee alcohol use may be a response to the physical and psychosocial qualities of the work environment (Ames and Janes 1992; Trice and Sonnenstuhl 1990), such as work demands on an employee, an employee's level of boredom, lack of participation in decisionmaking, and interpersonal conflict with supervisors and coworkers.