Dl. Morrison et R. Clements, THE EFFECT OF ONE PARTNERS JOB CHARACTERISTICS ON THE OTHER PARTNERS DISTRESS - A SERENDIPITOUS, BUT NATURALISTIC, EXPERIMENT, Journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 70, 1997, pp. 307-324
Studies investigating the transference of stress have shown that occup
ational stressors are transmitted from the job incumbent to a cohabiti
ng partner, affecting not only his/her physical and psychological heal
th but life expectancy as well. These studies remain limited in that t
hey are based on simple bivariate correlations and hence are open to t
he criticism that: (i) causality has not been demonstrated; (ii) the o
bserved correlations may be due to uncontrolled confounding influences
. This study aims to overcome these limitations by using a longitudina
l design where job characteristics 'naturally', but: predictably, fluc
tuate to identify the causal relationship between one partner's job an
d the other partner's distress. The sample comprised 82 Navy couples (
54 sea-based and 28 shore-based personnel). The job stressors under in
vestigation included the deployment of the seagoing partner and his pe
rceptions of job characteristics (role ambiguity, conflict and work ov
erload). Both the impact on partner well-being of object ive and subje
ctive perceptions of job characteristics were included in che present
study. The results showed that the well-being of the partners who rema
in at home fluctuates as a function of deployment-status and the marin
ers' perceptions of their job characteristics. It is concluded chat th
e seagoing partners' job characteristics do have a causal influence on
the well-being of their partners.