New Directions in Organizational Psychology and Behavioral Medicine

Cary Cooper, Alexander-Stamatios Antoniou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409410829
• eBook ISBN: 9781317088509
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

This research shows the dynamic relationship between work, health and satisfaction. New Directions in Organizational Psychology and Behavioral Medicine, comprehensively covers new developments in the field of occupational health psychology and provides insight into the many challenges that will change the nature of occupational health psychology. The editors have gathered 40 experts from all over the developed world to discuss issues relevant to human resource and talent management, and specifically to employment related physical and psychological health issues. Especially because it comes at a time of economic turbulence that will create work stress and strain, organizations, researchers and practitioners will find this book valuable.

PART I
New Challenges for Occupational Health Psychology

1
A Short History of Occupational Health Psychology: A Biographical Approach

Amy Christie and Julian Barling

The past century has seen many fascinating changes in the way in which people are viewed within the work context. There has been a shift from a perspective in which workers were valued primarily for their ability to be productive, with anything interfering with the potential for productivity seen as a hindrance to be controlled (Taylor, 1911), to a focus on employee well-being. The large body of research now focusing on the topic of employee well-being demonstrates the magnitude of this shift. This interest transcends the world of research, with organizations showing concern about the health of the workforce as well. Seminal in this transformation of the view of work, workers and their well-being has been the work of international researchers over the past century. This chapter presents and evaluates their substantial contribution. How substantial has this contribution been? A traditional academic perspective would examine, for example, citations to various articles or authors, or note that this field now has a formal name (occupational health psychology), its own acronym (OHP), and two flagship journals. We offer a different perspective, exploring the history of OHP by considering some of the most seminal contributions to the field. There are certainly not many social scientists who have had a rock band named in their honor, or a knighthood bestowed on them for their work. In this chapter, however, we will meet two social scientists, among others, involved in OHP research who can make such claims!

Marie Jahoda: Unemployment and Mental Health

There are surely very few people for whom it could be said that their lifetime’s work helped shape an entire field; that they served as a role model to the field; that their publishing career spanned eight decades—and eventually had a rock band named after them!¹ But this is certainly true of Marie Jahoda, and it is in appreciation of her life and her influence that we begin this chapter. In witnessing a life so rich, the challenge is not what to include, but rather what can we afford to omit?

Marie Jahoda was born in Vienna on January 26, 1907. Her first publication appeared in 1926. Her early influence, however, derived principally from the results of research into the mental health effects of unemployment within the Marienthal community (Jahoda, 1933; Jahoda, Lazarsfeld, and Zeisel, 1933). That this book would continue to influence research on unemployment is all the more remarkable given that most copies of the first published edition were burned by the Nazis because of the three authors’ Jewish origins. Jahoda’s focus on research into the nature and consequences of unemployment for mental health continued for the rest of the century, with her retirement in 1972 simply being the occasion for an extraordinary burst of research and writing.

This trajectory culminated in a book Jahoda published in 1982, which described the psychological nature and experience of unemployment (and employment). Jahoda (1982; 1989) posited that work is a fundamental human activity that is critical for mental health, noting that people would often prefer “bad” jobs to unemployment. From her understanding of unemployment, she identified two major functions of employment. The manifest function of employment was the provision of sufficient financial resources, and could be contrasted with latent or psychological functions, which included the provision of a time structure, social contacts, and personal identity. The absence of any of the latent consequences would be detrimental to mental health, and her theory is sometimes referred to as the “deprivation theory of unemployment.”

A chapter on the life and influence of Jahoda would be remiss if it were limited to a focus on her research on unemployment and mental health; her interests and her impact were much broader. Aside from the numerous professional awards and honorary degrees bestowed on her, a professional chair named in her honor in Germany, and the fact that she held a junior cabinet position in the United Kingdom, Jahoda was also a lifelong social activist. She was jailed in Austria in 1936–37 for her leadership role in the Austrian socialist youth movement, and exiled immediately thereafter to England in 1937 where she spent the war-time years. After emigrating to the United States at the end of World War II, she worked actively against the excesses of McCarthyism, became a board member of the American Civil Liberties Union, and was the first female president of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Her social activism was inseparable from her professional career (e.g., Jahoda, 1956; 1959), culminating in her interests in action research (e.g., Jahoda, Deutsch, and Cook, 1951).

Marie Jahoda characteristically remained engaged in thinking and writing throughout her life. Demonstrating the breadth of her interests and influence, one of her last works (published five years before her death in 2001) was a translation into English of the sonnets of Louise Labe, the sixteenth-century French proto-feminist poet (Jahoda, 1997).

Arthur Kornhauser: Work and Mental Health

The term “occupational health psychology” was first penned in 1990 by Jonathan Raymond (Raymond, Wood, and Patrick, 1990), however, interest in the health and well-being of workers emerged much earlier. Some have argued (e.g., Zickar, 2003) that industrial psychologist Arthur Kornhauser’s commitment to identifying organizational factors thought to improve the well-being of workers was instrumental to the development of the field. Beginning in the 1920s, Kornhauser was devoted to the study of worker well-being, and pioneered efforts to understand the effects of work on mental health at a time when prevailing interest concentrated on how pre-existing mental illnesses affected organizational efficiency. Instead, Kornhauser was interested in the range of mental health, both positive and negative, including all those psychological and behavioral attributes indicating life satisfaction, adjustment, and effectiveness. He believed that developing scientific, practical methods of morale or opinion surveying and psychological testing could be beneficial to improving the lives of workers and society overall (see Zickar, 2003). Contrary to the Tayloristic principles of the early twentieth century, Kornhauser’s lifetime work fuelled the surge of research interest that, in the decades following his retirement, would explore the impact of organizational factors on employee mental health (Sauter and Hurrell, 1999). Likewise, during this era, Kornhauser’s counterparts in Europe were also revealing the erroneous assumptions of scientific management, specifically indicating its deleterious effects for the health and adjustment of employees doing specialized work (e.g., Trist and Bamforth, 1951).

Kornhauser’s final contribution to the field was probably his most influential: an in-depth study of Detroit autoworkers’ work and well-being in the 1950s (Kornhauser, 1965). This incredible undertaking, consisting of over 400, four-hour interviews, was published in 1965 as the now classic book, Mental Health of the Industrial Worker. In his quest to explore the psychological condition of factory workers in the mass-production industry, Kornhauser offered a number of conclusions that only much later became part of mainstream thinking and conventional programs of research. For example, in his comparison of autoworkers at various organizational levels, Kornhauser found that mental health was stratified by occupational category, such that men in lower employment grades experienced worse mental health than those in higher grades—a phenomenon later investigated at length, and supported empirically, by Marmot and his colleagues (discussed in more detail later). For Kornhauser, the key to understanding this stratification was job satisfaction, which, like mental health, varies across organizations, making salient organizational and managerial influences on the mental health of workers. Accordingly, he identified a number of job characteristics thought to detract from positive mental health, including the lack of opportunity for self growth and esteem, financial stress, task repetitiveness, aspects of supervision and other human interaction, career immobility, job insecurity, and adverse physical conditions. Finally, well before the work-family conflict literature gained such prominence, Kornhauser was investigating the interface between work, family, and leisure in his interviews, concluding that job dissatisfaction could spill over into non-work domains, a notion which is now held to be axiomatic.

The seminal findings of the Detroit autoworker’s study are infused into the research of today and form part of the foundation of occupational health psychology itself.

Robert Kahn

Another critical early influence in the development of OHP was Robert L. Kahn from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, the home of so many early contributions to the discipline of social psychology. In 1949, Rensis Likert, whose influence has permeated the field in its own right, founded and became the first director of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, where Kahn served as the director of its survey research department from 1970 to 1976. The ISR remains one of the most long-standing American research institutions in the social sciences, continuing its influential interdisciplinary social research today. Kahn first became an expert in survey methodologies, and was perhaps initially most widely known for his book, The Social Psychology of Organizations, co-authored with Daniel Katz (Katz and Kahn, 1966). As the title suggests, he and Katz applied the principles of social psychology to large corporations, and a second edition of the book appeared in 1978. However, while Katz continued his work in social psychology, Kahn was already interested in how organizations influenced employee health. His second groundbreaking contribution to OHP started with his now-classic research on the relationship between role stressors and health (Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, Snoek, and Rosenthal, 1964), an issue that continues to attract empirical attention today (Beehr and Glaser, 2005).

Kahn et al. (1964) showed that role conflict, role ambiguity, and role overload (both quantitative and qualitative) were important stressors for men in their national sample of the US labor force. Outcomes such as lower job satisfaction, job-related tension, withdrawal, and lower self-confidence were associated with role stress. Kahn et al. (1964) also showed that organizational factors influence role expectations and pressures that ultimately determine workers’ experiences of inter-role conflict and ambiguity, and that interpersonal relations and personality factors moderate this relationship. Subsequent research over the next 40 years validated and extended their findings; and Kahn’s 1980 book, appropriately entitled Work and Health, further extended the way in which this link is viewed.

Kahn has continued to publish well into his retirement years, with a particular focus on aging, including a broadly successful book about aging well co-authored with physician John Rowe (Rowe and Kahn, 1998).

Jeffrey Greenhaus and Nicholas Beutell: Work and Family Conflict

Kahn and colleagues predominantly focused on role conflict within the domain of work, however, their pioneering research inspired Greenhaus and Beutell’s (1985) seminal article exploring inter-role conflict between work and non-work pressures. While certainly not the first to consider the work and family interface (authors such as Robert Hoppock studied this issue as early as 1935), Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) offered a theoretical framework for understanding the work-family conflict concept that legitimized its study in the management field. The main focus of this literature has been to understand how work and family functioning mutually influence one another. Changes in the composition of the workforce, with more women working outside the home, more single-parent families, and a greater number of dual-earning households, have amplified the importance of this endeavor over the past few decades. Today, the focus on work-family conflict is widespread, being studied in at least 37 different countries (Bellavia and Frone, 2003).

Based on role theory (Kahn et al., 1964), Greenhaus and Beutell (1985) define work-family conflict as occurring when an individual’s work roles and family roles are in some way incompatible, and specifically identify time-based, strain-based, and behavior-based conflict as the most prevalent forms of such incompatibility. In this way, time constraints, strain, and in-role behavior in the work domain can make meeting role demands in the family domain difficult or impossible, and vice versa, a concept first modeled and empirically tested by Frone, Russell, and Cooper (1992; 1997). Many theories of work-family conflict have been offered today that promise to make valuable contributions to our understanding of the way in which people experience the intersection of work and family, and their joint influence on employee well-being. However, Greenhaus and Beutell (1985)’s conceptual article remains the most widely cited in the work-family conflict literature (197 citations as of 2001) even after controlling for the number of years since its publication.²

Sir Michael Marmot: The Whitehall Studies

Arguably the most rigorous and influential investigation of social and occupational status and health came from the now famous Whitehall studies conducted by Sir Michael Marmot and colleagues over the last 30 years—a program of research that earned Marmot a knighthood in the United Kingdom. The first Whitehall study, Whitehall I, beginning in 1967, was a longitudinal study of cardiovascular and other diseases in 18,000 male civil servants in London. The results were striking. Mortality rates were highest among men in low employment grades and lowest among those in higher grades, a finding made even more intriguing considering that civil servants certainly do not fall at the extremes of society’s social status hierarchy (Marmot, Shipley, and Rose, 1984). The relationship was in fact monotonic, such that at each level of the status hierarchy, those with lower social standing were more vulnerable to morbidity and mortality than their higher status colleagues (Marmot, 2004). Although the findings from Whitehall I countered the hypothesis that the demanding and “stress-filled” atmosphere experienced by executives left them most at risk for coronary heart disease, it could not uncover what caused the social gradient in health. Moreover, after controlling for risk factors such as age, smoking, plasma cholesterol, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, physical activity, height, and family history, two-thirds of the gradient remained, thus giving birth to a second major study, Whitehall II.

Whitehall II began with over 10,000 men and women in the civil service in 1985 and continues through its seventh phase today with its purpose being to understand what underlies the health gradient. In this effort, Marmot and colleagues have illuminated the role of the psychosocial work environment in creating social health inequalities, and in doing so, point out the salience of work itself and its organization (Marmot and Shipley, 1996). These ideas transcend the domain of epidemiology, having been accepted by psychologists, sociologists, and organizational researchers. Over the course of Whitehall II, diverse factors have been identified as contributing to the social gradient, including job demands, control, social support, effort-reward imbalance, job insecurity, organizational change, work-home balance, and retirement, all of which can be observed in the over 250 published works based on the study that had already been published by 2005.³ Such research has directed health policy makers away from looking solely to individual behaviors and lifestyle factors in their efforts to prevent chronic diseases in society. In fact, the impact of the Whitehall studies has extended beyond that of the research community, and has directed British health policy changes over the last decade, creating a primary focus on reducing societal health inequalities in the country.

Christina Maslach and Susan Jackson: Job Bur...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: New Directions in Organizational Psychology and Behavioral Medicine
• PART I NEW CHALLENGES FOR OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
• PART II WORK AND DISPOSITIONAL OCCUPATION SOURCES OF HEALTH
• PART III HEALTH, MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
• PART IV JOB INSECURITY, UNEMPLOYMENT AND MENTAL HEALTH
• PART V SPECIFIC ISSUES OF OCCUPATIONAL HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY
• Index