Nearly anyone who has worked for someone else has run into a manager who was cruel or incompetent or both. That manager’s qualities kill your desire to work. New research shows that they could kill you, too – by eliciting from you feelings of being trapped, helpless, and inefficient in a bad job. This can become unhealthy for you and the business too, harming both job performance and product quality.

Evidence is mounting that a bad job can raise your blood pressure during working hours and keep it elevated long after quitting time. Doctors are accumulating biological data that support this observation. And other bad-job studies show they can boost the risk of hospitalization for suicide attempts, alcohol-based illnesses, digestive diseases, mental problems, and traffic accidents. Bad jobs also are linked with higher rates of heart disease.

What are the markings of a “bad job”? Yours is bad if both of the following hold true:

• You have no or low control over what you do and how you do it. (Your boss insists on making and enforcing decisions.)

• You have a job with high psychological demand. (You must do too much work in too little time.)

A low-control/high-demand job lands a one-two punch to your psyche, brain, heart, and body. You’re locked into using work methods that don’t suit you, and you’re pushed to work too quickly.

There’s a third job element: social support. Without it, a bad job becomes a horror. With it, a bad job is less bad. You get social support when your coworkers and supervisor reach out to help when you need it.

Lisa Webster, 21, says she loves her customer service job at Smalley Transportation Company, a trucking outfit in Tampa, Florida. She says she quit a “very stressful” job as an airline reservations agent, taking hundreds of calls from irate customers with no chance to respond creatively or discuss problems or ideas. “Now,” says Lisa, “I can share a problem with a coworker. My supervisor wants to hear my suggestions. The big boss listens too.”

Robert A. Karasek, professor of work environment at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, says about 20 percent of American men hold bad jobs. He began researching job strain and heart disease in 1980. Dr. Karasek says holders of low-income jobs – clerks, laborers and waitresses – are more likely to face job strain than are bosses or various professionals, such as engineers. More research may prove that workers in high-strain jobs also are more at risk for heart disease.

A study of 215 men by Dr. Peter L. Schnall, a cardiologist at New York Hospital in Manhattan, revealed that those who complained of job strain were more likely to have high blood pressure. Pictures of the heart made by high-frequency sound waves – sonograms – revealed that the muscled walls of their hearts were thicker. Such pictures predict a high risk of heart attack.

“We identified a risk factor that links job strain and hypertension,” says Dr. Schnall, “but more research must be done.”

The stress culprits, Dr. Karasek says, are bosses and supervisors who, in the name of short-term efficiency and profits, dehumanize work and tell people how to do their jobs, allowing employees no input.

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GENERAL HEALTH