This paper attempts to study the effects of anticipated and retrospected fits in explaining additional variance in various stress-strain relationships. A self-report questionnaire was administered on 370 men and women working in eight different occupations. The resultant data has been analyzed through step-wise regression method. The results show that retrospected fit indeed explains stress-strain relationships better in a wider range of variables, while anticipated fit has a rather restricted effect on the variables considered.

The study of stress in the organizational context has initially been done by Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snock and Rosenthal (1964). Since then, their pioneering studies in role stress and stress in organizations have become an important point of reference. Job stress has mostly been defined as external agents disrupting the normal functioning of the individual and thus causing strain. Caplan, Cobb, French, Harrison and Pinneau (1975) defined stress as “any characteristic of the job environment that poses a threat to the individual”.

From an interactional point of view, Margolis, Kroes and Quinn (1974) defined stress as a condition at work interacting with worker characteristic to disrupt psychological or physiological homeostasis. Perhaps the most comprehensive interactional definition of job stress was given by French, Rodgers and Cobb (1974). They defined job stress as a “misfit between a person’s abilities and demands of the job and misfit in terms of a person’s needs as supplied by the environment.” This approach of looking into job stress is known as the p-e (person-environment) fit approach.

Stress in the Organizational Context, stress, anticipated, retrospected, characteristic, stressstrain, agents, analyzed, discrepancy, disrupt, Harrison, homeostasis, Margolis, misfit, organizational, Pinneau, regression, restricted, Caplan, Rodgers, Rosenthal, variance.