The Influence of Personal and Workplace Characteristics on the Job Stressors of Design Professionals in the Chinese Construction Industry

Rapid growth in the Chinese construction industry is exposing many design professionals to elevated stress levels with negative implications for their health and well-being, and in-turn project outcomes. However, it is surprising that there has been little research into job stressors affecting design professionals in the construction industry. The aim of this paper is to help address this gap in knowledge by reporting the results of research that explored the job stressors of design professionals and how they vary across various personal and workplace characteristics. Data was collected via a survey of 408 design professionals in the Chinese construction industry, supported by in-depth sensemaking interviews with nine Chinese design professionals. Survey data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics combined with qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. Results indicate that task-related stressors are the leading sources of job stress for design professionals in the industry. Managing job workload, job requirements, and job ambiguity are the main task-related stressors and are linked to time pressures, working overtime, high workload, balancing multiple projects, and high levels of responsibility. Results also indicate that gender, marital status, age, education background, years of design experience, design discipline, position, and professional title are mediating factors in a design professional’s job stressor profile. Being the first large-scale empirical investigation of the job stressors among design professionals in the Chinese construction industry, the findings provide new empirical and conceptual insights into an increasingly important yet under researched problem and concludes with practical recommendations to reduce job stress for design professionals in the industry, which has broader relevance in other countries.

The current research findings have important practical implications for Chinese design professionals and for managers of design organizations and construction projects in China that involve design professionals. By providing new insights into the critical stressors that affect design professionals and the influence of personal and workplace characteristics on their job stressors, this research provides a strong empirical foundation for new evidence-based stress management initiatives and policies to reduce job stressors in this critically important professional group. For example, this may include involving design professionals or design organizations in the redesign of their jobs and working environments and the development of flexibility policies that enable better work-life balance, such as working remotely, paternity leave, and shorter work weeks. More importantly, the findings point to the importance of changing the demanding nature of work in the construction industry and developing more targeted measures to improve individual resilience and stress-coping capabilities for design professionals, especially those subgroups to which the results indicate are subject to stronger job stressors. These groups include electrical design professionals, design professionals with a higher level of education or job position, and professionals with family caring responsibilities.