The Effort-reward Imbalance Model: Experience in Japanese Working Population

The validity of Siegrist's eftort-reward imbalance model was examined in Japanese workers: I 05 dental technicians, 902 employees of production companies, and 2, 827 selected from staff of hospitals. After controlling for possible confounders, Ievels of the two stress measures, 'effort-reward imbalance' and 'overcommitment', were similar for both genders. The effort-reward imbalance was most prevalent in the 25-30 age employees and then decreased with age, but the level of overcommitment increased with age. Those with lower educational attainment and others who reported working long hours were more often exposed to effort-reward imbalance and those in the private sector reported higher overcommitment levels than their respective counterparts. Hospital staff (predominantly nurses) had almost twice as high a level of effort-reward imbalance as production workers. A review of empirical studies confirmed validity of the criterion with respect to a self-reported health outcome and the responsiveness of the measures to organizational changes. Nevertheless, the low prevalence of an effort-reward imbalance (originally formulated by Siegrist's group on European samples) in Japanese employees seemed to reduce the statistical power of these tests.