In developed nations, there often is an emphasis on what is possessed or how much money is earned. This strong value system pro- vides support for people in these cultures and may enable them to deal with greater amounts of stress. Staff are getting downsized but the work remains, so workloads are getting upsized. Changes in office procedures are happening more rapidly than at any other time in history. Now, everything is different.
Some professions are especially prone to stress resulting from changing technology.
Technology in automation has en abled employers to eliminate many jobs. Not only does this result in a fear of being replaced by a machine, but those who keep their jobs must undergo retraining and tend to have a higher level of respon sibility, and thus greater stress, thrust up on them. Now only about half of managers and employees rate security as good or very good, down from 75 to 80 percent in the 1980s. A particularly alarming cause of stress, and part of a vicious circle as it also is a symptom of stress, is aggression or violence in the workplace. It is estimated by the U.S. Justice Department that each year more than a million people are the victims of violence at work, accounting for about 15 percent of all violent crime in the country.