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Introduction
Despite the significant amount of research and increased awareness of organizations and individuals regarding work-related stress, this issue still generates high levels of ill-health and sickness absence in the workplace. In Great Britain, in 2008/2009 the estimated incidence of stress-related cases stood at 230,000 and there were 11.4 million stress-related absence days ([12] Health and Safety Executive (HSE), 2009).
To tackle stress at work, the HSE, the national regulator for health and safety at work, developed extensive guidance on stress risk assessment and management, known as the Management Standards approach ([11] HSE, 2007). Launched at the end of 2004, this approach involves encouraging employers and employees to work together to identify psychosocial risks and adopt solutions to minimize these risks. Stress is defined as "the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed on them" ([11] HSE, 2007). The Management Standards refer to good management practice with regard to six main psychosocial risks in the workplace: job demands, control, support from management and peers, relationships at work, clarity of role and organizational change. Theoretical underpinnings justifying the focus on these particular job characteristics as well as practical developments of the Management Standards have been fully reported in studies by [19] MacKay et al. (2004) and [4] Cousins et al. (2004).
The regulatory framework in Great Britain requires employers to assess the risks posed by workplace factors and implement solutions to mitigate these risks. Employers can adopt the Management Standards to help them carry out their assessment or they can use alternative approaches as long as they carry out a sufficient risk assessment on stress.
The aim of this paper is to identify how employers have implemented the Management Standards in large organizations, the organizations for which the national stress policy guidance was originally developed. An understanding of the key activities, and of the enabling or hindering processes occurring at each of the five steps of the risk assessment method, will provide insights as to what constitute the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach for stress prevention and reduction.
Five-step risk assessment
As summarized in [21] Mellor et al. (2011), the HSE guidance on risk assessment for managing stress is based on five steps assuming senior management commitment...