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Do you give your all to your job but get little praise in return? A study of workplace stress suggests that throwing yourself into work that you love, but not receiving any rewards for it, is a toxic cocktail for biological stress.

, now at Eindhoven University of Technology, in the Netherlands, and his colleagues discovered this by analysing people鈥檚 cortisol levels. This hormone is released in times of stress, helping prepare the body for 鈥渇ight or flight鈥� by increasing blood sugar levels and slowing down digestion, for example.

Such stress responses can be helpful in the short-term, but chronic stress can lead to health problems, such as infections and diabetes. To find out if certain workplace conditions might cause this kind of damaging stress, the team analysed hair samples from 172 volunteers. It is possible to deduce cortisol levels from the chemical聽makeup of a hair, with each centimetre corresponding to about a month in time.

Worth the effort?

There are two leading ideas about how workplace stress might affect people. One is that the amount of independence or autonomy a person has in their job, and the amount of support they receive from colleagues and bosses, determines how stressful a position is. The other hypothesis is that how much effort a person puts into it, versus how much reward they get back, is more important.

To investigate these ideas, the team compared cortisol levels from 91 people who work a typical, day-time working week, with the cortisol levels in 81 people who are undertaking executive training programmes, such as MBAs, alongside their day jobs. These people have a lot more to do, working longer hours and also studying, says van der Meij.

His team found that effort versus reward seems to be the best determinant of work place stress 鈥� but only among people who have particularly high workloads and long hours. 鈥淲hat鈥檚 dangerous is if you don鈥檛 get compensated,鈥� says van der Meij. 鈥淲hen you like your job and want to do well, but you don鈥檛 get promoted or a pay rise, that cocktail leads to high cortisol.鈥�

Long term health effects

Meij suspects that the long-term consequences of this could be dangerous. 鈥淚t may be good that cortisol levels are higher in the short-term 鈥� it may help them cope with the workload,鈥� he says. 鈥淏ut we don鈥檛 know if, in the longer term, it leads to disease. It could lead to burnout, which can take years to recover from.鈥�

鈥淗air cortisol is a good marker of chronic stress,鈥� says聽, at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. Long-term, we might expect to see health effects like exhaustion, depression and being more vulnerable to sickness, as well as lower wellbeing and life satisfaction, she says.

Van der Meij thinks bosses have a responsibility to ensure employees are rewarded for the work they do. 鈥淸Employees] should be able to see that their input is worth something,鈥� he says. 鈥淎s an employer, you have to ensure that they have the prospect of opportunities, especially if they are committed and do a lot of work.鈥�

Read more: Don鈥檛 give up the day job: Why going to work is good for you