THAT'S MEN: A Swedish study has found that the risk of heart disease rose for men who saw their bosses as incompetent
THIS YEAR has seen an accumulation of evidence that bad managers who create extra stress for their workers may also pose a risk to physical health.
Swedish researchers who tracked the experiences of 3,000 men for a decade, have produced some disturbing findings.
For instance, they found that the risk of heart disease rose for men who saw their bosses as incompetent. And the longer they stayed in the job, the higher the risk became.
According to the research report in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, the men in question felt they got little support from bosses and that their work was not valued.
Managers' competence at setting goals, at giving feedback and at communicating generally, were rated by all the men in the study.
The risk of heart disease was 25 per cent higher for men with incompetent managers than for others. And for men who worked for these managers for four years or more, the risk was 64 per cent higher - a remarkable figure.
The researchers suggested that companies concerned for their employees' physical health need to look at their managers' leadership abilities.
These findings should not be dismissed as the product of just a single research exercise. In Britain, a long-term study of civil servants has found that high stress levels are seriously damaging to health, especially of younger people.
This study has been rolling since the 1960s and for that reason is especially valuable. The most recently reported section of the study - in The European Heart Journal- commenced in 1985 and involved 10,000 civil servants.
As in Sweden, researchers found a strong link between heart disease and stress, with those who regarded their work as stressful suffering much higher levels of disease.
Interestingly, the link was particularly strong for people under 50 years old. People in that age group who said their work was stressful had a 70 per cent higher risk of heart disease than their unstressed colleagues.
The researchers speculated that stressful work was more likely to be piled on younger people than on those approaching retirement age and that this accounted for the difference.
One of the odder findings in both the British and Swedish studies was that the elevated risk appeared to apply regardless of the lifestyle of the workers concerned.
The stressed workers, as you might expect, were more likely to live in unhealthy ways - less likely to eat well, less likely to exercise, for instance.
Yet some of the unstressed workers also had unhealthy lifestyles, but still had a lower risk of heart disease than their stressed colleagues.
Of course, an unhealthy lifestyle carries its own risks, but stress also seems to have an independent effect on health. The researchers in the London study suggest that stress disrupts how the nervous system regulates the heart.
Stress also seems to disrupt the neuroendocrine system which regulates the release of hormones. This disruption seems to lead to higher levels of cortisol - which is associated with stress - at certain times of the day. These findings also bring home the dangers of workplace bullying. People who are bullied in the workplace suffer extreme levels of stress. They don't sleep well and experience a great deal of anxiety or anger and sometimes both.
They may fall into depression, which itself has been shown to have a damaging effect on physical health.
Employers, in my experience, are bad at confronting bullying, especially when the culprit is in management. The result can be a worker suffering higher and higher levels of stress and spending longer and longer periods of time out on sick leave, but with little prospect that the bullying will end.
Very often, the best thing an employee in this situation can do for himself or herself is to get out and go to work in an employment which is free of bullying.
People who are bullied are extremely reluctant to leave, though - the thought of handing victory to the bully is hard to accept.
Yet if they have complained to management, if they have asked the bully to stop, if they have gone to their trade union and the bullying is still going on, staying or leaving may be a matter of life or death.
• Padraig O'Morain is a counsellor