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Stress-Preventive Management Competencies: Comparison
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Please note this is a comparison between Version 2 by Arao Fu and Version 1 by Glauco Cioffi.
Work-related stress is a critical issue that demands prevention strategy and continuous monitoring due to its widespread influence on workers, businesses, and the global economy. The primary drivers of employees’ work-related stress are psychosocial risks, which arise when key work characteristics—such as job demands, autonomy, or role clarity—are mismanaged, leading to harmful consequences. Conversely, effectively managing these factors can promotes well-being and performance. Supervisors play a central role in this dynamic process of either mitigating or exacerbating psychosocial working conditions. As such, stress-preventive management competencies (SPMCs) are essential for promoting employee and organisational health. SPMCs refer to a set of supervisory behaviours—including planning, organising, setting objectives, and creating and monitoring systems—that contribute to a positive perception of the psychosocial work environment among employees. This entry, by approaching the existing literature on work stress models, psychosocial perspectives, and related management competencies frameworks, aims to provide a comprehensive overview of SPMCs, identifying key insights and proposing directions for future research.
  • healthy leadership
  • organisational interventions
  • supervisors’ development
The term “stress” has its etymological roots in the Latin strictus, meaning “narrow”, later evolved into Old French estrece and Anglo-Norman estresce, signifying “tightness” or “oppression” [1,2][1][2]. However, the scientific interest in the stress conceptualization was stimulated by Selye in 1936. Selye initially defined stress as a non-specific physiological body response to any demand for change [3] and later refined this definition as “the state manifested by a specific syndrome, consisting of all the non-specifically induced changes within a biological system” ([4], p. 64). In his animal studies, Selye found that various harmful environmental stimuli—such as high temperatures, physical injuries, or toxic substances—triggered both specific effects and non-specific somatic symptoms, such as ulcers in the stomach or intestines, regardless of the nature of the stressor.
Building on Selye’s foundational work on physiological stress responses, occupational health research has shifted focus towards understanding how organisational and psychosocial factors influence stress experiences in the workplace. Specifically in occupational health science, three mains but overlapping approaches have been developed to conceptualise work-related stress: the engineering, the physiological, and the psychological [5]. The engineering approach considers stress a noxious characteristic of the work environment. The physiological approach defines stress as the effect of a broad-spectrum of adverse stimuli targeting two neuroendocrine systems: the sympathetic adrenal medullary system and the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis ([6]; see [7] for a review). Meanwhile, the psychological approach, integrating cognitive and emotional processes, conceptualises stress as a dynamic interaction between individuals and their work environment.
This latter approach received even more interest because it replies to a shared limit of the engineering and physiological approaches, which build on a “relatively simple stimulus-response paradigm and largely ignore individual differences of a psychological nature” ([5], p. 35). In contrast, the psychological approach highlights how different individuals may appraise the same environmental stimulus differently, leading to different psychophysiological responses. Similarly, a single individual may interpret the same stimulus differently depending on the situation. Influential contributions within this domain include Lazarus [8], who introduced the notions of cognitive appraisal (i.e., meaning attributions to stimuli) and coping (i.e., individual and trainable strategy to tackle stress), or the Person-Environment Fit theory [9], which focused the (in) congruence degree between the employee’s attitudes/abilities and the job demands as an antecedent of work-related stress.
Nowadays, a shared definition of work-related stress is “the harmful physical and emotional response caused by an imbalance between the perceived demands and the perceived resources and abilities of individuals to cope with those demands” ([10], p. 2; see [11] for a review). The primary causes of work-related stress are commonly referred to as psychosocial risks [5,10][5][10]. These risks emerge when critical work characteristics (i.e., psychosocial factors, such as demands, control, support, or role, which define work organisation, work design and labour relations) are mismanaged. Together, work-related stress and psychosocial risks are remarkable public health and safety threats, significantly impacting workers, businesses, and the economy (e.g., [12,13,14,15][12][13][14][15]).
To mitigate these risks, various countries have introduced legislative measures to establish a culture of risk prevention in the workplace. In Europe, employers are legally obligated to reduce workers’ exposure to psychosocial risks following the 1989 European Commission Council Framework Directive (89/391/EEC). Similar regulations exist in some Latin American countries, such as Colombia, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, and in parts of Africa, including Angola, Congo, and Egypt. However, other nations, including the United States, Russia, and Australia, lack comprehensive legal frameworks addressing psychosocial risks. These discrepancies contribute to significant inequalities in worker protection and occupational health outcomes [16].
Given the complexity of the phenomenon, best practices suggest that programmes aimed at reducing work stress and improving well-being require multi-stakeholder involvement (e.g., [17,18][17][18]), multilevel interventions (e.g., [19]), structured and participatory approaches (e.g., [20]), strategic and dynamic perspectives (e.g., [21]), and intervening before the symptoms arise by designing preventive interventions (e.g., [14,22,23][14][22][23]).
Notably, the main, but not only, social actor who affects the psychosocial work environment of employees is the supervisor [24,25,26][24][25][26]. By communicating, organising, and designing work, the supervisors’ agency is remarkably involved in optimising or mismanaging psychosocial factors. Additionally, they can be emotionally contagious within their team (e.g., [27,28][27][28]) and they play a crucial role in the intervention process, organisational development, and change [29,30,31][29][30][31]. For these reasons, interventions aimed at developing leadership and manager behaviours are considered effective [32,33][32][33] and recommended [14,34][14][34].
Leadership development is a relatively new field of study that is longitudinal and multilevel in nature [35], which is growing in both research [36] and practice [37]. However, the literature on supervisors-focused interventions to prevent work-related stress and psychosocial risks is not yet in the maturity stage. Organisational interventions on supervisors highlight a general employing of performance-oriented frameworks, such as transformational or transactional leadership styles (e.g., [38,39,40,41][38][39][40][41]). These traditional approaches may not fully grasp specific behaviours related to employee well-being [31,42][31][42].
Conversely, only four alternative approaches have explicitly framed the promotion of employee health and the prevention of psychosocial risks as core leadership responsibilities.
Gilbreath and Benson developed the first approach in the early 2000s [43]. Shortly thereafter, the Management Competencies for Preventing and Reducing Stress at Work (MCPARS) framework was developed and preliminary tested [25,26,44][25][26][44]. While in 2018, St-Hilaire et al. [45] suggested a new competency-based approach, and in 2025 a study defined and identified the digital stress-preventive management competencies [46]. These latter frameworks are broad, behaviour-based, and aim to identify specific management competencies that can optimise psychosocial factors perceived by subordinates. The theoretical perspective underpinning this area of research is that “stress management is a part of normal general management activities” for leaders ([25], p. 11) and that “good supervision is more than a nice to have” ([24], p. 112).
A comprehensive review regarding this approach is lacking in the literature. This contribution might open new research questions and clarify the state of the art on a remarkably interesting subject for practices such as organisational interventions and theory on psychosocial risk prevention. Accordingly, this entry reviews current knowledge on stress-preventive management competencies and outlines possible directions for future research in this field.
In order to provide supporting background on the topics of our entry, the ensuing paper section briefly outlines (2) the psychosocial perspective on work-related stress. Then, we describe the (3) stress-preventive management competencies framework and (4) the conclusion and prospects in this field.

References

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