1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.0 Overview Over ... - DSpace@UM

Interestingly, other earlier studies have shown some relationship between long hours ofwork and effect among men. It is a serious concern as Buell & Breslow (1960),discovered higher incidents of coronary heart disease in men who worked over 48 hoursper week. The interesting linkage with current study here is the fact that due toincreasing workloads, job insecurity, and pressure to perform by deadlines, manyindividuals are working longer hours ; be it men or women. Work overload, resulting inlonger working hours, has been positively linked with stress (Cooper, Davidson &Robinson,1982) and fatigue (Ono, Watanabe, Kaneka, Matsumoto & Miyako,1991).There were several other studies which relates stress to mental health of employees suchas those by Sparks, K., Cooper, C., Fried, Y., & Shirom A., who shared their resultsindicating significant mean correlation between overall health symptoms, physiologicaland psychological health symptoms, and hours of work (which are one of the stressors inthis research). They went on to say that qualitative analysis of 12 other studies supportedtheir findings of a positive relationship between hours of work and ill-health. Here, theyfurthered their conclusion that there are different factors which may obscure therelationship between health and hours of work, together with the moderating factors,which is covered to a certain extent under this study. Their paper also discarded theargument from certain sectors that ill-health reported may not be caused by long workinghours but other factors such as personality as they referred to two studies in the metaanalysis(Russek & Zohman,1958; Thiel et al., 1973) and six studies from qualitativereview (Alfresson et al., 1985; Buell & Breslow, 1960; Hinkle et al., 1968; Ong et al.,1982; Starin et al., 1990; Uehata, 1991) which found relationship between hours of workand health, using non-self-report measures.29