Review of Existing Supporting Scientific Knowledge to Underpin Standards of Good Practice for Key Work-Related Stressors, Phase 1

This study was undertaken to identify the best available evidence on the ways in which the following nine stressors affect individuals at work:

• poorly designed/managed workload
• poorly designed/managed work scheduling
• poorly designed/managed work design
• poorly designed/managed physical environment
• lack of skill discretion
• lack of decision authority
• lack of appropriate proactive support
• lack of appropriate reactive support
• poorly designed/managed procedures for eliminating damaging conflict at individual/team level (bullying/harassment).

The overriding aim was to conduct the review in as explicit and objective a manner as possible. To ensure that this was the case, the review was, so far as was possible, conducted in line with principles of evidence based approaches: ie, a systematic way of pulling together and assessing the quality of evidence around a given research question and making recommendations for practice.