Expanding the Psychosocial Work Environment: Workplace Norms and Work–Family Conflict as Correlates of Stress and Health Tove Helland Hammer Cornell University Per Øystein Saksvik, Kjell Nytrø, and Hans Torvatn Norwegian University of Science and Technology Mahmut Bayazit Cornell University This study examined the contributions of organizational level norms about work requirements and social relations, and work–family conflict, to job stress and subjective health symptoms, control- ling for Karasek’s job demand– control–support model of the psychosocial work environment, in a sample of 1,346 employees from 56 firms in the Norwegian food and beverage industry. Hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed that organizational norms governing work performance and social relations, and work-to-family and family-to-work conflict, explained significant amounts of variance for job stress. The cross-level interaction between work performance norms and work-to- family conflict was also significantly related to job stress. Work-to-family conflict was significantly related to health symptoms, but family-to-work conflict and organizational norms were not. The psychological and social conditions people experience in the workplace, often referred to as the psychosocial work environment, have become a reg- ular component in studies of stress and occupational health (e.g., Johnson & Hall, 1996; Johnson & Jo- hansson, 1991; Kasl, 1996, 1998; Theorell & Karasek, 1996). Among theories of stress are a set of models that focus especially on the effects of psy- chosocial work environment factors on mental strain and physical illness (see Cooper, Dewe, & O’Driscoll, 2001; Ivanevich & Matteson, 1980; Kahn & Byosiere, 1992; Koslowsky, 1998). These are sometimes identi- fied as models of the psychosocial work environment. Some have a narrow focus on job characteristics; others include broader social and economic factors. Early research by Gardell (1977) on the influence of social factors on disease etiology led him to argue that one should search for the causes of biological and social pathologies in the structure of work orga- nizations and the organizational resources employees were given to meet job demands. In the more narrow demand– control model developed by Karasek (1979) and Karasek and Theorell (1990), the demands work- ers experience at the point of production interact with the opportunities they have to influence work tasks and procedures to create different levels of stress. High job demands, in the form of workloads and time pressures, coupled with lack of control are likely to lead to mental strain and cardiovascular disease, par- ticularly when social support is low. A model of the relationship between person– environment fit and stress is focused on the degree to which employees’ skills, needs, and expectations match what employers require and provide (Caplan, 1987; Edwards, 1991, 1996). In a more recent model, Siegrist (1996) iden- tified the imbalance employees experience between high work effort and low rewards, lack of promo- tional opportunities, and job insecurity as important sources of stress and other negative health effects. It is the demand– control model that has received most of the attention in studies of stress and ill health (see Kasl, 1996; Kristensen, 1996). Despite its fre- quent use, however, the model and its measure, the Job Content Questionnaire (JCQ; Karasek et al., 1998), is considered by many to be too narrowly focused on the characteristics of the job itself to the exclusion of other relevant variables that determine workplace experiences, such as individual character- istics, work processes, group or organizational level Tove Helland Hammer and Mahmut Bayazit, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University; Per Øystein Saksvik and Kjell Nytrø, Depart- ment of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway; Hans Torvatn, SINTEF, Industrial Management, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Mahmut Bayazit is now at Koc University, Istanbul, Turkey. Correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to Tove Helland Hammer, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 383 Ives Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901. E-mail: thh2@cornell.edu Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 2004, Vol. 9, No. 1, 83–97 Copyright 2004 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 1076-8998/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/1076-8998.9.1.83 83