Fairness and Job Security, Not Stress Relief, Drive Workplace Productivity, Study Finds

What actually makes employees productive? For decades, managers and researchers have debated whether productivity flows from reducing stress, protecting jobs, or treating workers fairly. A new study from Iran offers a striking answer: when it comes to the non-faculty staff who keep a medical sciences university running, fairness and job security matter far more than stress management alone. The research, published in BMC Health Services Research, suggests that organizations hoping to boost performance may need to rethink where they invest their energy.

The study, conducted by Samira Alirezaei of the Social Determinants of Health Research Center and Moloud Miahi of the Department of Basic Medical Sciences at Saveh University of Medical Sciences, set out to untangle the relationships between three organizational factors—job stress, job security, and organizational justice—and the productivity of administrative and support staff. These non-faculty employees form the operational backbone of academic medical institutions, handling everything from finance and procurement to clinical administration, yet they are often overlooked in workplace research that focuses on physicians, nurses, or academics.

Between October 2025 and March 2026, the researchers recruited 215 non-faculty employees using simple random sampling, a method that gives every member of the staff population an equal chance of selection and reduces the risk of bias in who ends up in the study. Participants completed validated questionnaires measuring four constructs: job stress was assessed with the Health and Safety Executive Management Standards Indicator Tool, a widely used instrument developed by the UK’s workplace safety regulator that evaluates demands, control, support, relationships, role, and change; the remaining instruments captured perceived job security, organizational justice, and self-rated employee productivity. The study protocol received ethics approval from Saveh University of Medical Sciences, and all participants provided written informed consent.

The analysis combined descriptive statistics with two inferential techniques. Pearson correlation analysis measures the strength and direction of linear relationships between variables, producing coefficients that range from minus one to plus one. Hierarchical multiple linear regression then allowed the researchers to enter predictors in stages and determine which factors retained an independent association with productivity after accounting for the others—a statistical adjustment that is critical when the predictors themselves are correlated, as they were here.

The correlation results were unambiguous. Productivity rose in lockstep with job security, with a correlation coefficient of 0.674, and with organizational justice, at 0.671, both highly statistically significant. Job stress showed a negative relationship, expressed in the data as a positive correlation of 0.533 with HSE scores; because higher HSE scores indicate lower perceived stress, this means employees who felt less stressed also reported being more productive. On their face, all three factors appeared to matter. But correlation alone cannot reveal which factors drive productivity independently, because employees who feel secure also tend to perceive their workplaces as fair, and vice versa.

The regression analysis changed the picture dramatically. After mutual adjustment, organizational justice emerged as the strongest independent predictor, with a standardized beta coefficient of 0.381, followed closely by job security at 0.355, both significant at the p < 0.001 level. Job stress, by contrast, dropped to statistical irrelevance, with a beta of just 0.037 and a p-value of 0.575—essentially indistinguishable from zero once justice and security were taken into account. The final model explained 58.1 percent of the variance in productivity, a remarkably high figure for research on complex workplace behavior, where models typically account for far less.

Why would stress lose its apparent importance once fairness and security enter the equation? One plausible interpretation, consistent with the authors’ conclusions, is that much of what employees experience as stress is downstream of structural conditions rather than an independent cause of poor performance. A worker who believes promotions are awarded arbitrarily and whose contract feels perpetually precarious will report high stress—but the stress may be a symptom, not the disease. Interventions that target stress directly, such as relaxation training or individual coping programs, may therefore scratch the surface while leaving the underlying organizational conditions untouched. The authors explicitly conclude that interventions aimed at improving fairness and employment security may be more effective than focusing solely on individual stress management.

The concept of organizational justice has a rich history in organizational psychology, generally divided into distributive justice, or the perceived fairness of outcomes such as pay and promotion; procedural justice, the fairness of the processes used to reach those decisions; and interactional justice, the dignity and respect with which people are treated. In a university setting, where administrative staff often sit outside the prestige hierarchy that privileges faculty, perceptions of procedural fairness may carry particular weight. The study’s findings align with a broader body of evidence linking justice perceptions to commitment, trust, and performance, but they sharpen the message by showing that justice outperformed stress in a direct statistical contest.

Job security, the other dominant predictor, has taken on renewed salience in an era of economic uncertainty, automation anxiety, and restructuring across health systems and higher education. The mechanism connecting security to productivity is intuitive: employees who fear losing their positions may hedge their effort, disengage from long-term projects, or channel energy into job searching rather than institutional goals. Conversely, a credible sense of security frees cognitive and emotional resources for the work itself. For medical sciences universities, whose administrative machinery directly supports education, research, and patient care, the productivity of this workforce has measurable consequences for institutional performance.

The authors are careful about the study’s limits, and readers should be too. The cross-sectional design captures a single moment in time, so it cannot prove causation—productive employees might, for instance, feel more secure precisely because their performance is valued. The sample comes from a single institution in Iran, and the authors recommend multicenter studies to test whether the findings generalize to other universities, health systems, and national contexts. Self-reported productivity, while measured with validated instruments, remains a subjective indicator. Even so, the practical implication is hard to ignore: if organizations want more productive workers, the evidence points toward building transparent, fair decision-making processes and stable employment arrangements, rather than simply handing out stress balls. In the contest between fixing people and fixing systems, this study suggests the systems deserve the first look.

Subject of Research: Organizational determinants of employee productivity among non-faculty staff at a medical sciences university

Article Title: Organizational determinants of employee productivity among non-faculty employees of a medical sciences University: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Organizational determinants of employee productivity among non-faculty employees of a medical sciences University: a cross-sectional study. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-026-15784-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12913-026-15784-5

Keywords: employee productivity, organizational justice, job security, job stress, medical sciences university, cross-sectional study, occupational health, hierarchical regression, health services research, workplace psychology, human resource management, Iran