Are Public Workers More Stressed Than Private Workers? The Relationship Between Work Stress and Value Congruence

Abstract

Work stress is one of the problems that organizational psychologists have been concerned with during the last few decades. However, there is still no general consensus about the relationship between this type of experience and value congruence within the working organizations. This study attempts to identify the relationship established between work stress and value congruence, considering value congruence as the states of adjustment, conflict, and value recognition. In our calculations, we included other socio-demographic variables such as gender, age, and organizational tenure; and organizational variables such as the company’s sector. The study was applied to a sample of 298 workers, distributed in two organizations from different sectors (Nprivate= Npublic = 149). The results obtained have indicated conflict as the element of value congruence that correlates significantly with work stress (β = 0.022, p < 0.05). Other results have indicated significant correlations between gender and work stress (βmen= -0.424, p < 0.05), and between organization sector and work stress (βprivate = 0.293, p < 0.05). This investigation is relevant not only to the context in which it was applied, but also as a comparison framework with other research about value congruence and work stress organizations.