Effort-Reward Imbalance
topic
The effort-reward imbalance (ERI) model (Siegrist) proposes that occupational stress and its health consequences are driven by the mismatch between high work effort (workload, time pressure, responsibility) and low reward (inadequate salary, poor recognition, low job security, blocked career advancement) — with people who invest significant effort without proportionate reward experiencing chronic threat activation and HPA dysregulation, and those with high overcommitment (who invest even more than required while receiving inadequate reward) showing the highest cardiovascular disease risk.
Role
The ERI model captures the specific experience of professional exploitation that many workers in underrewarded, high-demand roles experience but lack a framework to articulate — the sense of working extremely hard for insufficient recognition, compensation, or security that produces the most damaging combination of high effort expenditure and inadequate HPA axis-calming reward. Healthcare workers, educators, social workers, and many service industry employees experience structural ERI that individual stress management cannot resolve — because the source of the imbalance is systemic undervaluation of their work rather than personal coping deficits.