It appears that quasi-experimental approaches to the evaluation of organizational stress
management interventions do not adequately measure, or take account of, employees’ perceptions of the
interventions themselves, or the way they are implemented. This is a problem because these perceptions
may influence intervention outcomes. As a consequence, our understanding of the why these
interventions succeed or fail is somewhat limited. In this chapter we present research that attempts to fill
this gap in the literature. In the research we used measures of employees’ perceptions of process factors
such as intervention quality and sustainability within a longitudinal intervention evaluation study. In 11
intervention projects in Denmark (n=376) three types of organizational stress management interventions
were examined: individual-focused interventions, teambuilding activities and training activities. We then
analysed the data using structural equation modelling to find out whether employees’ direct appraisals of
the change processes and the intervention itself influenced the relationship between intervention exposure
and intervention outcomes. We found that employees’ perceived influence on the content of teambuilding
and training interventions was directly linked to participation in these interventions. More importantly,
participants’ appraisals of the quality of activities within an intervention and / or their perception of the
sustainability of an intervention’s impact were found to be important in the mechanisms driving
intervention outcomes. These appraisals were shown to partially mediate the relationships between i)
exposure to all types of intervention investigated and ii) interventions employee reports of behavioural
stress and job satisfaction. We examine the implications of the findings of this research for future
research and the implementation and evaluation of interventions in organisations.
