Occupational Stress Scale

Abstract

The Occupational Stress Scale (OSS) was developed by House, McMichael, Wells, Kaplan, and Landerman in 1979. It is a psychometric instrument designed to measure the frequency with which employees report being bothered by specific stressful occurrences in their professional lives. The scale assesses the construct of perceived occupational stress through five distinct and interrelated subscales.

These five subscales provide a comprehensive assessment of the extent of stress attributable to: job responsibilities (responsibility pressure), concerns regarding the quality of work output, role conflict, interference between work and personal life (job vs. non-job conflict), and overall workload intensity. The OSS is valuable for identifying specific sources of job strain in research and organizational health contexts.

Keywords

Occupational Stress Scale, OSS, job stress, responsibility pressure, role conflict, workload, quality concerns, job satisfaction, Type A personality, psychometric scale.

Authors

House, J. S., McMichael, A. J., Wells, J. A., Kaplan, B. H., Landerman, R.

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Purpose

The primary purpose of the Occupational Stress Scale (OSS) is to quantify the subjective experience of job-related strain by measuring how often an individual is disturbed by various workplace stressors. By focusing on frequency, the scale provides a quantitative measure of exposure to psychological demands and conflicts inherent in the work environment.

The segmentation of the scale into five distinct subscales allows for detailed analysis, providing researchers and practitioners with the ability to isolate specific dimensions of stress, such as excessive demands (workload) or interpersonal conflicts (role conflict), facilitating targeted interventions for organizational improvement and employee well-being.

Construct

The psychological construct measured by the OSS is **Perceived Occupational Stress**. This construct is conceptualized as a multidimensional phenomenon, reflecting the strain experienced by employees across several critical areas of their professional life. The five dimensions that constitute this construct are:

• Responsibility Pressure: Stress stemming from the weight of accountability for others or the high cost associated with potential errors.
• Quality Concerns: Stress related to perceived limitations on achieving high-quality work, often due to time constraints or organizational pressures.
• Role Conflict: Stress resulting from receiving contradictory demands or having unclear expectations from different colleagues or supervisors.
• Job vs. Non-Job Conflict: Stress experienced when work obligations (like overtime) interfere negatively with personal or family life.
• Workload: Stress associated with the intensity of work demands, including requirements to work very fast, very hard, or under severe time pressure.

Validity

The validity of the OSS has been demonstrated through its systematic relationships with established psychological and organizational variables. Occupational stress, as measured by the OSS, was found to correlate negatively with protective factors such as social support at work, an internal locus of control, and overall job satisfaction. Conversely, stress demonstrated positive correlations with known organizational stressors, including role ambiguity, role conflict, and personal discrimination (Holder & Vaux, 1998).

In terms of internal structure, the five stress dimensions (responsibility pressure, role conflict, workload, quality concerns, and job vs. non-job conflict) were found to intercorrelate positively, supporting the convergent nature of the scale’s subcomponents. Furthermore, the dimensions consistently correlated negatively with extrinsic job rewards and job satisfaction. Notably, all five dimensions showed positive correlations with employee Type A personality, while workload, quality concerns, and job vs. non-job conflict specifically correlated negatively with intrinsic job rewards (House et al., 1979).

Reliability

The internal consistency reliability of the OSS subscales was assessed using Coefficient alpha (also known as Cronbach’s alpha). The reported alpha values indicate varying levels of reliability across the five dimensions, generally falling within acceptable ranges for brief scales in psychological research (House et al., 1979; Holder & Vaux, 1998):

• Responsibility pressure yielded alpha coefficients ranging from .59 to .76.
• Job vs. non-job conflict exhibited coefficients ranging from .56 to .76.
• Quality concerns achieved an alpha coefficient of .72.
• Role conflict demonstrated an alpha coefficient of .70.
• Workload stress reported a strong alpha coefficient of .73.

The variability in the lower bounds of the alpha values (.56 to .59) suggests that users should exercise caution when interpreting the responsibility pressure and job vs. non-job conflict subscales in isolation, although the upper range of the coefficients indicates sufficient internal consistency in certain populations.

Factor Analysis

The structure of the Occupational Stress Scale is theoretically grounded in five distinct factors corresponding to the five specific sources of strain. Although the original source material does not provide explicit results from a formal factor analysis (such as component loadings), the decision by House et al. (1979) to develop and report on five separate subscales strongly implies a successful differentiation of these factors.

The empirical evidence supporting the factor structure lies in the positive intercorrelations among the five dimensions, which confirms their shared contribution to the overarching construct of occupational stress, while their distinct measurement (as suggested by the subscales) allows for separate analysis of the unique causes of strain.

Instrument

Test Type: Self-report psychometric scale

Format: Multi-item, 5-point Likert-type scale.

Language Available: English (Original development language).

Population Group: Employed adults.

Age Group: Adult working population.

Population Details: The original validation sample consisted of factory workers, suggesting applicability across diverse occupational sectors, particularly those involving high demands or physical labor.

Test Methodology: Respondents quantify the frequency of specific bothersome occurrences in their work environment using predefined frequency anchors.

Keywords

Job demands, employee health, psychosocial factors, reliability, validity, locus of control, job rewards, organizational psychology, stress measurement.

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Authors

Author ORCID Identifier: Not provided.

Affiliation Email addresses: Not provided.

Correspondence Address: Not provided.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The scale was first published in 1979. The items were sourced from House et al. (1979), with copyright held by the American Sociological Association. Researchers or organizations wishing to utilize the scale must seek appropriate permission from the American Sociological Association. Details regarding specific usage fees are not available in the original source content.

Reference’s

• House, J. S., McMichael, A. J., Wells, J. A., Kaplan, B. H., & Landerman, R. (1979). Occupational stress and health among factory workers. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 20, 139-160. Items were taken from text, pp. 157-158. © American Sociological Association. Reprinted with permission.
• Holder, E. E., & Vaux, A. (1998). Social support and work-related stress. In C. P. Zalaquett & R. J. Wood (Eds.), Evaluating stress: A book of resources (pp. 159-178). Scarecrow Press.

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Items of the Occupational Stress Scale

IMPORTANT: The following scale items must be preserved in their original language and must not be changed in any way.

Responses to the items for responsibility pressure, quality concerns, role conflict, and job vs. non-work conflict are obtained using a 5-point Likert-type scale where 0= not at all, l = rarely, 2 = sometimes, 3 = rather often, and 4 = nearly all the time.

Responsibility pressure items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

1. Feeling you have too much responsibility for the work of others.
2. Having to do or decide things where mistakes could be quite costly.
3. Not having enough help or equipment to get the job done well.

Quality concerns items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

1. Thinking that the amount of work you have to do may interfere with how well it gets done
2. Feeling that you have to do things that are against your better judgment
3. Feeling unable to influence your immediate supervisor’s decisions and actions that affect you

Role conflict items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

1. Thinking that you’ll not be able to meet the conflicting demands of various people you work with
2. Not knowing what the people you work with expect of you
3. Having to deal with or satisfy too many people

Job vs. non-job conflict items:

How often are you bothered by each of the following in your work?

1. Feeling that your job tends to interfere with your family life
2. Being asked to work overtime when you don’t want to
3. Feeling trapped in a job you don’t like but can’t get out of

Workload items:

(Responses to the following questions code O = never, I = rarely, 2 = some times, 3 = fairly often, and 4 = very often.)

1. How often does your job require you to work very fast?
2. How often does your job require you to work very hard (physically or mentally)?
3. How often does your job leave you with little time to get everything done?