The interest for the study of the stress in the labor world has been growing in the academic literature, particularly in the last years. A reason for the increase of research on this theme is the negative impact of the occupational stress in the health and in the satisfaction of employees and, consequently, in the operation and in the effectiveness of the organizations. In the economy, the negative impact of this variable has been estimated based on the supposition and on the evidence that stressed workers reduce their acting and increase the costs of the organizations with health problems, increase of absence, employee turnover and the number of accidents in the labor environment. The present work proposes to analyze the theoretical models about occupational stress and psychosocial factors. For this, we will present approaches that study the occupational stress and the psychosocial factors in the labor environment. In this article, therefore, we will present the principal models that discuss psychosocial factors and occupational stress: job-demand-control, job demand control support model, effort-reward imbalance model, ecological model and the National Institute for Occupational and Health (NIOSH) proposal.
Stress; Psychosocial factors; Occupational health; Work