Sugarmaa M, Lkhagvasuren Ts

A number of studies demonstrated that an adverse psychosocial work environment is associated with health risk outcome. However these studies are mainly based on samples from developed western or rapidly developing countries. Whether similar results are found in post-communist societies in transition, such as Mongolia is still unclear. We study this question in a Mongolian sample using two established job stress models, demand-control and effort-reward imbalance. The analyses are based on a sample of employees of government service in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia (n=315). The psychosocial work factors were measured by original scales of the two models. Indicators of well-being were used: self-reported health and depressive symptoms (CES-D), hypertension, obesity and serum lipids. In addition, socio-demographic and socio-economic variables were included. Following descriptive analyses, multivariate logistic regressions models were estimated.Having assessed psycho metric prop erties of the Mongol ian version of the work stress scales, fin ding s demon strate for each model poorer well-being in the presence of work stress. However, when testing the two models simultaneously, ly, sign ific ant odds ratios (OR) are observ ed for effor ffor t-r eward imbalanc e, with OR for self-r ated health = 2.83 and OR for depr essive symptoms = 2.51 and for job strain with OR for obesity = 2.83. These results indicate that the two models of job stress can be applied to a working population in Mongolia.