INDIVIDUAL AND NOMOTHETIC MODELS OF JOB STRESS - AN EXAMINATION OF WORK HOURS, COHESION, AND WELL-BEING

Many models of job stress are implicitly based on the assumption that there is considerable variability in how individuals perceive and resp ond to their environments. In this paper, we introduce a nomothetic pe rspective of job stress. The nomothetic perspective assumes that despi te individual differences there will be consistencies in how groups of individuals perceive and respond to similar work environments. To con trast the individual and nomothetic perspectives, we analyzed data fro m 7,382 respondents from 99 groups. In the analyses, we examined indiv idual- and group-level relationships using both real groups and random ly formed groups. The results revealed that respondents from the same work group agreed about perceptions of the work climate. The results a lso revealed that both individual and nomothetic perspectives were use ful in describing the relationship between cohesion and psychological well-being. The relationship between work hours and psychological well -being, however, was best modeled from a nomothetic perspective.