Essentials of Occupational Health Psychology

Christopher J. L. Cunningham, Kristen Jennings Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781138541115
• eBook ISBN: 9781351011914
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Essentials of Occupational Health Psychology provides a thorough overview of Occupational Health Psychology (OHP) with a focus on empowering readers to take appropriate and reasoned action to address a wide variety of worker health, safety, and well-being challenges that are present in working situations all over the world.

Although relatively new as an area of specialization, OHP research and intervention efforts are already having major impacts on the way work is done around the world. Each of the twelve chapters in Essentials of Occupational Health Psychology addresses an essential aspect of OHP, with a consistent emphasis on putting what is known about that area into practice. Topics include essential background information regarding the history of OHP and major areas of OHP research and practice, such as work-related stress and recovery, psychological and physical demands and resources, interpersonal mistreatment, work and nonwork role dynamics, and safety. Each chapter features a discussion of why these topics are important to workers and organizations, as well as pertinent evaluation and/or intervention recommendations to help readers better understand what they can do to improve worker health, safety, and well-being, and how to convince others of the value of such efforts. Additional supplements within each chapter include a set of targeted learning objectives to help structure student reading and in-class discussion, focused discussion questions, pertinent media resources to provide current examples of these topics, and professional profiles based on interviews conducted by the authors with fourteen well-known and widely respected OHP researchers and practitioners.

Essentials of Occupational Health Psychology is valuable to graduate and advanced undergraduate students as well as working professionals who are interested in learning how to manage work environments that support worker health, safety, and well-being. The chapters in this text could also provide supplemental reading for training and development workshops for professionals in related disciplines who could benefit from a better understanding of the psychology associated with work experiences.

1
Understanding the Psychology of Occupational Health

Christopher J. L. Cunningham and Kristen Jennings Black

This chapter provides readers with a foundational understanding of the field of occupational health psychology (OHP) and its reason for existence. Professionals in OHP focus on protecting and improving worker health, safety, and well-being (WHSWB). We review this field of OHP and show at a high level, how OHP professionals fit within a broader network of professional disciplines with expertise relevant to the protection and promotion of WHSWB. In this chapter we explain what OHP is and how OHP is most effective as part of a multidisciplinary approach to managing WHSWB. In addition, we highlight and briefly describe a number of organizations and initiatives that promote and support OHP-related research and practice.

When you are finished reading this chapter, you should be able to:

• LO 1.1: Describe the history and origins of the field of OHP.
• LO 1.2: Describe the current state of OHP as a research and practice discipline.
• LO 1.3: Explain why and how addressing WHSWB requires multidisciplinary efforts that include psychology.
• LO 1.4: Identify various institutions and organizations that support ongoing education and dissemination of OHP knowledge.

Overview of OHP

As you are reading this chapter, we can only assume that you are interested in better understanding what OHP is all about and how the theories, methods, and findings from OHP research and practice can be used to benefit workers, organizations, and maybe society more generally. By definition, OHP is a field of study and practice in which behavioral and social science theories, principles, and evidence are used to protect, promote, and generally improve worker health, safety, and well-being (WHSWB). For most OHP professionals, these three areas are broadly defined and multifaceted. Health is typically conceptualized along multiple continua pertaining to physical, psychological, social, and emotional forms (see Hoffmann & Tetrick, 2003 for an excellent discussion of different ways health has been operationalized). Safety is often focused on physical risk situations, with the goal of preventing physical harm, injury, or even death. However, safety for OHP professionals may also include psychological forms of safety.

Finally, worker well-being is related to health and safety, but often conceptualized even more broadly and in a multi-dimensional way to include dimensions of positive health along with the availability of essential resources that support health (e.g., shelter, food, security) and a sense of purpose and meaning (Bennett et al., 2017; Chari et al., 2018). Together, these elements contribute to the very broad concept of general wellness (e.g., Adams et al., 1997), which is also linked to a variety of salutogenic or health-causing factors (Antonovsky, 1979). These ultimate objectives of WHSWB are met not only when health-related symptoms are reduced, but when workers are able to positively and adaptively function in emotional, social, and cognitive ways that support thriving and even flourishing (cf., Fredrickson, 1998; Ryff & Singer, 1998).

The focus for OHP researchers and practitioners is primarily on the ways in which experiences at work, exposures to work tasks, and associated environmental factors impact WHSWB. Because worker health transcends the boundaries of a work domain, OHP professionals also often consider cross-domain (i.e., work-to-nonwork and nonwork-to-work) phenomena and effects. This crossover and spillover of health-related influences and outcomes between work and nonwork domains means that promoting and protecting WHSWB is important for workers, organizations, and society more broadly.

Defining OHP

When attempting to define a construct, phenomenon, or, in this case, professional discipline, it is helpful to not only describe or delineate what it is, but also what it is not. When it comes to OHP, this is easier said than done, because the knowledge, skills, and abilities of well-trained and experienced OHP professionals is often so broad. OHP supports and is influenced by many professional disciplines that target occupational health, including occupational medicine, industrial hygiene, and public health (Macik-Frey et al., 2007). OHP professionals can amplify, facilitate, and enhance the work of professionals with more domain specific KSAOs by leveraging expertise in designing and conducting research and interventions to promote and protect WHSWB. We share the hope of many in this arena that in the coming years we will see an increase in the amount of interdisciplinary collaboration on research and practice efforts to address WHSWB challenges (cf., Sauter & Hurrell, 2017).

Most OHP professionals are trained to be scientists and practitioners, which can mean a variety of different things. In our interviews with OHP professionals (noted in the Preface), we asked how a scientist-practitioner model applies to their OHP-related work. The overarching theme from these responses (more detail in Table 1.1) is that OHP research and practice are strengthened and better aligned with actual WHSWB issues because of this underlying scientist-practitioner perspective.

Table 1.1 OHP Professionals’ Perspectives on Being an OHP Scientist-Practitioner

Key Themes	Essential Elements
Science informs best practice and provides solutions with high likelihood of success	Understanding underlying mechanisms of a tool, program, or activity Developing interventions based on what is known Removing need for expensive consultants
Science and practice inform and support each other	Theories and empirical evidence help identify what is happening and why Practice identifies key issues and real-world problems Practice provides real-time and real-world experience Practice helps translate science into application
Scientist-practitioner model helps to ensure comprehensive development of graduate students and early career professionals	Teaches research-minded to always think about the “so what” and application potential Challenges practitioner-minded to seek understanding and explanation through data and theory

Most OHP professionals are not licensed or otherwise certified to provide direct healthcare or clinical services to individuals. Our ability to fully address WHSWB issues is contingent on our ability to collaborate and coordinate with other occupational health professionals. For example, epidemiologists may be very effective at monitoring and describing health-related phenomena, but may struggle to explain why workers are behaving in certain ways. Likewise, industrial hygienists might be able to identify significant exposure risks in a work setting, but be more effective at addressing these risks with OHP assistance in designing, implementing, and evaluating psychologically, socially, and behaviorally oriented interventions targeting the worker in addition to the work environment.

Figure 1.1 illustrates how OHP knowledge and methods can amplify other types of efforts to improve WHSWB. The left panel in this figure is a simple representation of how various professional disciplines and silos may attempt to improve WHSWB in a general and perhaps not fully direct way. The dotted lines indicate that these efforts may be less than fully effective. The right panel in this figure illustrates how these general efforts can be amplified or strengthened when OHP knowledge and methods are included, ensuring that critical psychological and social factors are taken into account. In other words, OHP professionals can complement and supplement work by other occupational health professionals, by improving depth of understanding, deepening and broadening systems thinking about WHSWB issues, and strengthening WHSWB intervention delivery and evaluation strategies.

Figure 1.1 OHP as Amplifier of Efforts to Influence WHSWB

A Multi- and Inter-Disciplinary Imperative

The broad class of WHSWB issues targeted by OHP professionals is understandably complex and multifaceted. It should not be surprising, therefore, that these issues cannot be addressed from a single perspective or set of knowledge, skills, or competencies. For OHP professionals to be as impactful as possible, we need to learn to think and work in a multidisciplinary fashion (Adkins, 1999). This means understanding and collaborating with professionals in a variety of different domains that all have expertise pertinent to the challenge of managing WHSWB challenges.

This includes but is not limited to the professional disciplines summarized in Table 1.2. The definitions and societies referenced are by no means comprehensive, but high-level examples of the work done in these diverse areas to understand and address WHSWB issues. Even from just a psychological perspective, there are many different pathways and approaches to OHP-related work. Obviously, there is a strong representation of professionals with psychology training in OHP most specifically. All occupational health professionals, however, must understand and appreciate the need to work with professionals in other related occupational health and applied psychology disciplines to actually understand and address complex WHSWB challenges (Sauter & Hurrell, 2017).

OHP as a Lens or Hub

A really important and powerful way of thinking about OHP is to treat it as a lens through which we can more fully see, understand, and ultimately impact WHSWB issues. Using this lens can lead us to make and advocate for better choices and decisions in the many situations where WHSWB is likely to be affected. This applies to just about all of us, regardless of the positions we may hold in organizations. For example, any talent management professional has frequent opportunities to apply an understanding of OHP to inform decisions and take actions that keep workers healthier and safer, regardless of organizational context. We can also think of OHP as a sort of hub science, which can help to connect and amplify work that is done to protect and promote WHSWB from many different functional areas (as represented in Figure 1.2).¹

Figure 1.2 OHP as a Lens or Hub

Developing and Supporting OHP

What we identify as OHP today is a relatively new area of specialization for those who are primarily trained in some branch of applied psychology (as discussed in the next section). As noted in an informative early review by Quick (1999a), however, the field of OHP has evolved over a long history, which can be traced back at least as far as the late 1800s and the work of early occupational health focused researchers and practitioners such as Hugo Münsterberg (1913), and showing up in later work by other well-known researchers such as Kornhauser (1965; see also Zickar, 2003), Herzberg (1964), and Lazarus and Folkman (1984), among many others. The current profession of OHP really started taking shape in the late 1990s. The use of the OHP label for this area of specialization is traced back to an article by Raymond, Wood, and Patrick (1990), in which a model was outlined for OHP as a doctoral-level specialization. Around this same time, the American Psychological Association (APA) and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) had initiated a bi-annual conference series now known as the International Conference on Work, Stress, and Health. This ongoing conference seri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the Authors
• 1 Understanding the Psychology of Occupational Health
• 2 Designing and Evaluating Occupational Health Psychology Interventions
• 3 Individual Differences That Matter in OHP
• 4 Worker Psychological Health
• 5 Worker Physical Health
• 6 Work-Related Stress and Recovery
• 7 Psychological and Social Demands and Resources
• 8 Interpersonal Mistreatment at Work
• 9 Work and Nonwork Role Dynamics
• 10 Physical and Environmental Demands and Resources
• 11 Safety at Work
• 12 Broadening OHP Impact Beyond the Workplace
• Index