Ethnicity and Stress at Work: A Literature Review and Suggestions for Future Research
Roberto Capasso *
Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples "Federico II", Via Rodinò 22, 80133, Naples, Italy.
Maria Clelia Zurlo
Department of Political Sciences, University of Naples "Federico II", Via Rodinò 22, 80133, Naples, Italy.
Andrew P. Smith
Centre for Occupational and Health Psychology, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, 63 Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AS, United Kingdom.
*Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.
Abstract
Aims: Ethnicity and culture represent a novel topic in the literature on stress and wellbeing at work because there has not been enough consideration of them in studies of work stress. This paper aims to present a critical review and evaluate recent articles investigating ethnicity in the literature on stress and wellbeing at work to identify limitations of previous research concerning all the aspects related to the cultural dimensions in this research area.
Methodology: Pubmed, PsycInfo and Scopus databases were searched for articles dealing with ethnicity and occupational health for the years 1985 to 2014. The studies were divided into three categories as follows: ethnicity and occupational mental health, ethnicity and occupational physical health, ethnicity and work stress.
Results: Sixty articles were selected, 26 on occupational mental health, 13 on physical health and 21 on work stress. None of the studies used a transactional perspective or took as a framework of reference general models of stress that integrate all the aspects related to ethnicity with work-related dimensions. Most of the reviewed studies measured ethnicity as a descriptive category of the working population studied (i.e. country of birth, nationality, language, skin colour, origin, racial group) or focused on the differences between ethnic groups and it has failed to consider the salient cultural aspects such as acculturation strategy, cultural identity and perceived racial discrimination.
Conclusions: The gap in the work stress literature on different aspects of ethnicity suggests further consideration of the potential role of cultural dimensions as individual differences or as potential sources of stress in work stress models and shows the need to develop and test a general model that integrates ethnicity and work-related stress in a transactional perspective.
Keywords: Literature review, ethnicity, culture, migrant workers, occupational health, individual difference, stress models.