The paper is based on a five year, UMIST‐Institute of Management study into the changing nature of the quality of working life and seeks to uncover differences in the incidence and impact of organizational change on the perceptions and experiences of managers in the public sector, the private...

Defines the employee assistance programme (EAP) and describes its potential and impact on organizations. Provides details of how EAPs operate at each step. Evaluates their use and value in the context of the need for organizational performance.

Until recently most evaluations of EAPs have been qualitative. In the US there has been a move towards insisting on hard data, i.e. cost‐benefit ratios. The nature of EAPs makes identification of a clear outcome oriented model of intervention difficult if not impossible. Discusses different...

Explores three themes: quality in EAPs; the regulation of the EAP profession; and integration between the EAP and the organization. Sounds a note of qualified optimism for the future.

Discusses the substantial increase in merger and acquisition (M & A) activity both domestically and internationally during the 1980s which, in contrast to previous waves of M & A activity, involved organizational marriages between organizations in the same area of business activity. As a result,...

Based on a sample of senior managers from West Midlands businesses, quantifies the level of executive stress in a regional setting. Identifies significant levels of stress generally but also reveals that stress is patterned across industrial sectors and by firm size. Also identifies and...

Examines the attitudes of senior, predominantly male staff to women managers in a specific industrial setting ‐ namely the West Midlands region of the UK ‐ using data derived from the Price Waterhouse West Midlands Business Survey. The survey is unique in that it is focused on eliciting the...

The topicality of ‘stress at work’ is largely due to a recognition of the harmful effects that the mental ill health of both management and workers can have on organizations. Attention in the USA has been focused on an estimated financial cost of $6 billion a year. In the UK the damaging...

The number of rendundancies is growing at a steadily increasing rate. Although a great deal has been written about it in the popular press, not enough systematic work has been done to assess the impact of this phenomenon on the psychological state of the redundant worker, his family and the...

The extent to which stress at work produces a degree of psychological impairment has become a central issue in the current debate on the quality of working life. Various analyses of alienation as a result of paced assembly lines and other forms of mass production have spawned a range of possible...