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Warning to CEOs and other top executives in high-pressure positions
Job stress could shave years off your life, causing you to die younger than lower-level workers
- A historical study by Tom Nicholas shows that high-level business executives died three to five years earlier on average than lower level workers at GE
- The research links the deaths to work-related stress
- Nicholas’s findings contradict the influential Whitehall studies, a British research initiative that began tracking public servants who worked in the Whitehall area of London in the 1960s
Job stress may vary by industry
Work-related management pressures likely vary from company to company, industry to industry, and between the public and private sectors.
- Additional research is needed to determine the degree and impact of stress on various white-collar workers and whether the findings of his research are applicable to other organizations.
Who’s more stressed: managers or their subordinates?
Past research has seen mixed results when exploring links between stress and high-status positions
- In biology, studies of primate social groups found that monkeys that were considered leaders were sometimes more stressed and sometimes less stressed than others in lower positions in the group
- Recent studies of business environments have found that executive positions take a toll on the health of top managers
Reconstructing life and death at GE
Nicholas chose to look as far back as the 1930s in examining the work and lifestyles of managers located mostly at GE’s then-headquarters in Schenectady, New York
- He relied heavily on GE’s employee directories, which listed all the managers within the company’s organizational structure
- Used US Census data, and other public and private documents to estimate the professional and social status of individual managers during the course of their careers
