Workplace Well-Being: How to Build Psychologically Healthy Workplaces

Citation

Vincent Cassar (2016), "Workplace Well-Being: How to Build Psychologically Healthy Workplaces", Personnel Review, Vol. 45 No. 5, pp. 1108-1110. https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-01-2016-0001

Understanding effective organizations relies on research on occupational stress, occupational health, work well-being as well as emerging fields like positive organizational scholarship. More so, today’s workforce is ever more conscious of the complex interplay between work and personal life; health and economics as well as performance and wellness at work. Employers have both a moral and legal obligation to enhance and maintain psychologically healthy workplaces (PHWs), particularly because benefits are reflected in an organization’s performance and financial bottom line.

The book Workplace Wellbeing: How to Build Psychologically Healthy Workplaces edited by Day et al. (2014) brings to the fore important themes and topics, some of which are still emerging and relate to wellness at work. Written by a number of leading scholars in the field, the book focuses on three questions spread over 16 chapters: “What is a healthy workplace?” (Chapters 1-3), “What are the components of a healthy workplace?” (Chapters 4-9), and “What are the building blocks of a healthy workplace?” (Chapters 10-15), along with a final concluding chapter (Chapter 16).

Chapter 1 (Day and Randell) presents the workplace as a health resource. The authors set the scene by defining PHWs as composed of a “lack of negative components”. Day and Randell inspire readers to view PHWs in terms of encouraging and embracing positive components. The chapter provides a comprehensive view about the factors contributing to the PHW. Chapter 2 (Cooper and Bevan) provides a review of the out-of-the-organization benefits as a function of a healthy workforce such as reduced tax revenues and increased healthcare costs. This is an interesting analysis as most studies seek to understand the detrimental effects on the organization rather than beyond. This is why this chapter can stimulate further thinking for future research that ventures beyond the direct benefits to the organization. Research on out-of-the-organization benefits can elevate the position of occupational health psychology to a higher level of importance from a social and economic perspective. Chapter 3 (Gilbert and Kelloway) reviews positive psychology and its applications to the workplace, citing a significant body of earlier works relating to positive psychology at work. The chapter emphasizes how positive psychology has the most encompassing role in a healthy workplace.

The discussion on the contextual elements underlying the PHW are captured in six chapters. The main issues discussed are occupational health and safety standards, work-life balance, empowerment and engagement, employee development, employee recognition, and culture and communication. Chapter 4 (Chen and Li) offers a critique of occupational health and safety as well as performance-based criteria as “outputs” of effective health and safety standards. The key factors that shape OHS performance are organizational support, safety climate and leadership, and the authors present these towards the end of the chapter. Chapter 5 (Hammer and Demsky) starts with a good summary of the main theories that explain work-life balance like role theory, boundary theory, work-family border theory and systems theory. A good proportion of this chapter is dedicated to proposing organizational and policy implications including new directions in this field that can inspire new research. Hammer and Demsky also discuss a number of interesting practical implications. Chapter 6 (Salanova and Llorens) reviews a derivative of participation at work: empowerment. The authors propose the “HERO” model that explains how empowerment drives engagement. Like the previous chapter, Salanova and Llorens propose a number of practice-based strategies that can enhance engagement. These propositions may easily serve as a fertile ground for further research.

Chapter 7 (Noe and Tews) offers an evaluation of the importance of employee growth and development in relation to well-being. Training and development provide strong contexts for employees’ enhancement of their well-being and the quality of their workplace. However, this chapter is dedicated to understanding the factors that determine learning rather than the relevance of training and development towards employee well-being, which is the subject matter of the book. While the authors provide an explanation of the power of learning on salient constructs at work (like meaningfulness), these issues are relegated to the end of the chapter. The power of learning on meaningfulness of work and other similar areas are central issues in learning at work literature, and these should been better positioned in this chapter. Chapter 8 (Tetrick and Haimann) provides a general understanding of employee recognition and of its correlates. Certainly, as the authors claim, employee recognition research is still relatively scarce. Tetrick and Haimann offer a stimulating piece that should inspire further exploration in this area. Chapter 9 (De Joy and Della) elaborates on Ostroff et al.’s model of health culture and climate. De Joy and Della offer a new dimension of organizational communication as a foundation upon “which the key attributes of a healthy workplace must be developed to be reflective” (p. 178). The chapter sets out a process model of initializing healthier organizations through culture. Overall, the chapter offers an interesting account on organizational communication but offers a prescriptive approach that relies only on weak evidence to support the authors’ claims.

The next six chapters focus on a number of aspects that are portrayed as the building blocks of effective PHWs, including respectful workplaces, leadership, employment relations, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and design. The topic of small businesses is also drawn into the debating circle. This part of the book is more intellectually engaging compared to the first half of the book. Chapter 10 (Leiter and Patterson) conceptualizes respectful workplaces and discusses areas like mistreatment and workplace incivility. Leiter and Patterson present a number of researched predictors and causes of workplace incivility, moving their discussion to inspire further areas for investigation. Chapter 11 (Nielsen) provides a basic review of leadership in terms of its impact on follower well-being. This is truly an important area of investigation that has not received much attention so far. Nielsen focuses on transformational leadership, and provides a short but interesting research agenda utilizing Implicit Leadership Theory and Social Identity Theory in view of explaining transformational leadership’s impact on well-being. Chapter 12 (Naswall and Sverke) is probably one of the most interesting chapters in the book. Naswall and Sverke look at PHW from the trade unions’ lens, reflecting employees’ concerns for health-promotional strategies and their integration within the broader strategies of the organization. Chapter 13 (Robertson and Barling) critiques CSR and its relationship with PHW relying on a number of studies that relate to attitudinal outcomes. Robertson and Barling also treat organizational ethics (as part of CSR) as a keystone for a PHW. While debating various conceptualizations of CSR, the authors move on to suggest interesting areas for further research. Chapter 14 (Clarke) offers an innovative perspective by treating small businesses in the context of PHWs. However, there seems to be a relative lack of depth in the arguments set out about how small business are different from larger firms in terms of building PHWs. Chapter 15 (Loughlin and Mercer) presents a holistic perspective on the debate of building a PHW. Indirectly, Loughlin and Mercer recommend further analysis and research to build an understanding about effective PHW from a multi-level perspective that involves both business units and composing employees. Chapter 16 is an overall commentary by Hurrell (who is also the co-editor of the book).

The book presents a number of new perspectives in terms of debate and argumentation. A number of chapters highlight areas that can be stimulating in developing new research thought and projects to advance the general field of occupational health psychology. This book therefore makes a solid contribution in this regard. It also brings together a number of topics that are relevant to the conceptualization of PHWs from a holistic perspective even though these are inevitably treated in different chapters. Certainly, advancement in research should be looking at multi-faceted factors as they operate in relation to each other and within a multi-level perspective and this is an aspect that the editors could have certainly highlighted further to strengthen the book’s position in the wider scope of the debate.