Biological Correlates of Social Support and Pressure at Work in Managers

The aim was to explore the patterns of correlations between psychosocial stress indices and neuroendocrinological factors in managers. Fifty-eight male managers in three Swedish companies constituted the sample. They answered two questionnaires with 17 selected stress indices and also an organizational test. The indices have been analyzed by means of computations of age adjusted partial correlations with nine different variables analyzed in fasting blood samples. The serum concentrations of lipids were the variables most strongly correlated with psychosocial factors. Neither smoking nor physical activity changed the correlations significantly. Good social support at work and in private life was consistently associated with low adverse serum lipids and corresponding lipoproteins. On the other hand, some indices of social support were associated with indices of high arousal levels. This may indicate a possible psychophysiological "load effect" of some aspects of social support in managers. The analyses of corporate culture measured as "Rules of the Game" indicated that "bureaucracy" was significantly associated with high LDL-cholesterol and low HDL-cholesterol. Managers have special conditions and therefore the patterns of associations between psychosocial conditions and coping strategies on one hand and endocrine-biochemical state on the other hand may be different from those of other groups. To what extent such differences are due to individual characteristics or environmental factors needs to be further investigated. According to the results, however, good social support is in general health promoting also to managers, at least with regard to serum lipids. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, seems to be dangerous to the health of managers.