Modeling Occupational Stress and Well-Being as a Dynamic Phenomenon: It’s About Time

Addressing occupational stress and fostering employee wellness helps meet a host of organizational stakeholder expectations including high quality of work life (employees), reasonable return on investment (investors), increased productivity (management), and competitiveness (owners). Despite being dynamic in nature, stress and wellness are often studied using a static perspective. One reason for the scarcity of dynamic empirical research is the limited knowledge and use of the tools available to assess change over time. To address this limitation, four tools used to assess change and dynamics of occupational stress and well-being are described: growth models, latent change score models, spectral analysis, and computational modeling. First, we begin by discussing growth curve models and then transition to latent change score models. We then expand into spectral analysis, a tool used to determine cycles of ups and downs that repeat regularly. Last, computational modeling is discussed, where computers and simulations are used to understand a dynamic process. For each tool, we give examples of how they have been used, make recommendations for future use, and provide readers with suggestions and references for how to complete analyses in software and programs, most of which are freely available (i.e., R, Vensim).