Work stress and alcohol use

Employees who drink heavily or who abuse or are dependent on alcohol can un dermine a workforce's overall health and productivity. To better understand the reasons behind employee abusive drinking and to develop more effective ways of preventing problem drinking in the workforce, researchers have dev eloped a number of paradigms that guide their research. One such paradigm i s the alienation/stress paradigm, which suggests that employee alcohol use may be a direct or indirect response to physical and psychosocial qualities of the work environment. Although in the alcohol literature, work alienati on and work stress traditionally have been treated as separate paradigms, c ompelling reasons support subsuming the work-alienation paradigm under a ge neral work-stress paradigm. Researchers have developed several models to ex plain the relationship between work stress and alcohol consumption: the sim ple cause-effect model, the mediation model, the moderation model, and the moderated mediation model. Of these, the moderated mediation model particul arly stands out, because it simultaneously addresses the two fundamental is sues of how and when work stressors are related to alcohol use. Recent rese arch supports a relation of work-related stressors to elevated alcohol cons umption and problem drinking. Future research should focus on the relation between work stressors and alcohol use among adolescents and young adults, because they are just entering the workforce and are the most likely to eng age in heavy drinking, longitudinal studies also are needed to better expla in the relation between work stress and alcohol use.