Motor fleet organizations or commercial transportation facilities rely on motor vehicle drivers to transport freight while providing on-time deliveries, undamaged products and customer satisfaction. If the driver is dissatisfied with the job as a truck driver, the company reputation, customer satisfaction, and freight transportation orders may decline which can, on a larger scale, impact the competitive advantage of the motor fleet operation. The competitive advantage of the organization can greatly influence the economics of the commercial transportation firm.
Kamp suggests that if the driver is found to experience an inordinate amount of stress (i.e., meeting impossible deadlines, disagreements with the supervisor, pressure to outperform), the stress actor will ultimately affect the economics of the organization (i.e., increased worker compensation claims, absenteeism, poor customer service, decreased driver retention rates.) (32–6). The International Labor Organization, as stated in the New York Times, suggests that job stress expenditures cost employers more than $200 billion a year (http://www.psycport.com/news/1999/09/01/medic/7299-0687-pat_nytimes.html). Therefore, it is essential to analyze the stress experienced by the driver because the driver plays a key role in long-range economics of the freight transportation organization. Further, the driver's job distress and well-being needs to be examined carefully in effort to retain healthy drivers, in addition to reducing occupational injuries and illnesses, job dissatisfaction, and the phenomenon of job "burnout."
Excessive stress in the workplace can have undesirable consequences on mental and physical health. Ten years ago the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) identified psychological disorders in the workplace as one of the ten leading work-related diseases and injuries in the United States and has recently stressed in the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) the importance of finding effective interventions to reduce stress in the workplace (http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nornew1c.html).
According to 1998 occupational injury and illness data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, truck drivers, as compared to other occupations, experienced the largest number of injuries and illnesses with time away from work over the latest 5 years for which they had data, 1992–1996. During this time, although the number of injuries and illnesses declined for all occupations by about 20 percent, the number increased for truck drivers by nearly 5 percent (up to 151,300) with women accounting for 17.6 percent. Psychological stress can contribute to these statistics. Contributors to stress in truck driving are irregular hours, long hours of boredom on the road, hazardous driving by other drivers, and getting insufficient exercise (MacLennan 79–95). Anothercontributor included management/supervisory/dispatcher concerns for the drivers. Truckdrivers are particularly vulnerable to psychological disorders since they experience higher levels of stress than individuals employed in other occupations; truck drivers are in the 91st percentile based on the Global Stress Index portion of the Symptom Checklist (SCL-90) (Orris, Hartman, Strauss, Anderson, Collins, Knopp, Xu, and Melius 208).
