The impact of technology characteristics and job control on worker mental health

Recent research suggests that the occurrence of operational problems in advanced manufacturing technology (AMT) places stressful demands on operators. Applying Karasek's demand-control model, we predict that two properties of operational problems, namely technological uncertainty and abstractness, interact with timing and method control to predict operator strain. The results failed to confirm ordinal effects for timing or method control, but showed a dis-ordinal (crossover) interaction for timing control. While these findings provide little support for the demand-control model, they suggest that two new processes, namely 'traction-distraction' and 'passivity-challenge', are critical to understanding the nature of the relationship between operational problems and operator strain in AMT systems. We describe these processes and examine the implications for future research. (C) 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.