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Clinical staff working in mental health services experience high levels of work-related stress, burnout and poor well-being. Increased levels of stress, burnout, depression and anxiety and poorer mental well-being among health-care workers are associated with more sick days, absenteeism, lower work satisfaction, increased staff turnover and reduced quality of patient care. Virtual reality (VR) relaxation is a technique whereby experiences of pleasant and calming environments are accessed through a head-mounted display to promote relaxation. The purpose of this paper is to describe the design of a study that assesses the feasibility and acceptability of implementing a multi-session VR relaxation intervention amongst mental health professionals, to improve their relaxation levels and mental well-being.

The study follows a pre–post-test design. Mental health staff will be recruited for five weeks of VR relaxation. The authors will measure the feasibility and acceptability of the VR relaxation intervention as primary outcomes, alongside secondary outcomes evaluating the benefits of VR relaxation for mental well-being.

The study aims to recruit 20–25 health-care professionals working in both inpatient and specialist community mental health settings.

Research indicates the potential of VR relaxation as a low-intensity intervention to promote relaxation and reduce stress in the workplace. If VR relaxation is shown to be feasible and acceptable, when delivered across multiple sessions, there would be scope for large-scale work to investigate its effectiveness as an approach to enable health-care professionals to de-stress, relax and optimise their mental well-being. In turn, this may consequently reduce turnover and improve stress-related sick leave across health-care services.

There is a link between stress experienced during adversity and negative outcomes, which demands the identification of mechanisms to minimize the harm. However, to date, these mechanisms remain unclear. This study will help us understand how to reduce the negative impact of COVID-19 stress (CS) on COVID-19 burnout (CB). The purpose of this study is to investigate the mediating role of meaning in life (MIL) in the relationship between CS and CB in the general population.

During the second wave of COVID-19 in India, 514 adults aged 18–75 years (M = 33.11 ± SD =10.42) completed the survey online. Testing of the model was conducted using the structural equation modeling technique.

Results indicated that CS had a positive impact on CB. CS explained 49% of the variance in CB. A mediation model was used to examine the relationship between CS and CB through MIL, which was also supported.

These findings explain the efficacy of MIL in reducing harm. It is imperative to promote MIL to prevent negative outcomes. Instead of treating symptoms of disorders, psychologists, mental health professionals and health-care workers should focus on prevention.

The model explains the underlying mechanisms between CS and CB. This is among the very few studies attempting to explore these variables among the general population. Therefore, it adds to the literature on ways to reduce the negative impact of stressors.

Healthcare professionals are key in healthcare organisations but are subject to long working hours and may have to make complex life-and-death decisions. As frontline agents dealing with human lives, giving them a voice is paramount. This study explores the impact of employee voice (assessed based on employee perceptions on how much they are consulted and how much influence they have on task-related decisions) on health professionals' work engagement and burnout when mediated by relational outcomes (perceived organisational support, workplace trust, workplace recognition and meaningful work).

A sample of 3,266 health professionals retrieved from the European Working Condition Survey was used. The quantitative analysis was performed using the partial least square structural equation modelling and multiple regression analyses.

The results indicate that employee voice has a direct positive impact on work engagement, but employee voice's direct effects on burnout still need to be confirmed. Relational outcomes are found to mediate the relationship between employee voice and burnout (decreasing it) and between employee voice and work engagement (increasing it).

Practices of employee voice in the workplace are fundamental to promoting health professionals' well-being. Trust, recognition, support and the feeling of doing meaningful work increase the influence of employee voice, especially in reducing the levels of burnout.

This is the first study that assesses, at a European level, the importance that ‘giving health professionals a voice' has on crucial employee outcomes: work engagement, burnout and relational outcomes.

The use of information and communication technologies has become widespread in the field of health as well as in all fields. While the intensive use of these technologies increases the productivity of the employees, on the other hand, it may cause negative effects on the employee such as stress, anxiety, anger, burnout, and addiction. In scientific studies, the use of technology is commonly related with saving time, labor, financial resources, effective, efficient, and quality service; however, there are limited studies focusing on the technostress factors in the health field brought by technological transfer and digital transition. These technostress factors are techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-confusion, techno-insecurity, and techno-uncertainty. In this study, it is emphasized that technostress causes important mental problems such as productivity and burnout, especially for female health employees. This chapter aims to discuss the role of technostress and its factor, theoretically, in the healthcare field in perspective of digital transition.

The objective of this paper is to examine the profound repercussions of workplace bullying (WB), emotional exhaustion (EE), and psychological distress (PD) on poor job performance (PJP) within the intricacies of Thailand’s healthcare sector. It also seeks to elucidate the moderating influence of COVID-19 burnout (CBO) on these variables.

This paper utilized a quantitative research approach. A total of 230 responses were collected from healthcare workers using convenience sampling during a significant surge of the coronavirus in March 2022. To assess the reliability and correlations between constructs, a dual-stage structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was applied.

During the global health crisis caused by COVID-19, WB and PD were found to positively predict PJP, except for EE. The presence of WB elevated EE and PD among Thai hospital staff. PD and EE partially mediated the relationship between WB and PJP. The positive moderating role of CBO among hospital employees significantly buffered the relationship between WB and EE.

The originality of this study lies in the examination of the poor mental health of Thai healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Healthcare reforms are required to protect the mental health of Thai healthcare staff to prevent poor job performance following unprecedented circumstances.

This study investigates the relationship between family incivility (FI) and burnout in line with the conservation of resources theory and work–home resources model. The authors also examine the conditional indirect effects of psychological capital (PsyCap) and life satisfaction (LS) in the aforementioned relationship. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues.

Data were collected using a time-lagged methodological design by administering a structured questionnaire among 296 rural doctors. The collected data were analyzed using PROCESS macro in Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) 23.

The study indicates that FI is an emotional home demand and influences burnout at the workplace through the depletion of LS. At the same time, PsyCap proves to be a vital resource that mitigates the adverse effects of FI and burnout.

This study adds to the work–family and well-being literature by exploring the underlying mechanism through which FI connects to different outcomes. The implications of these findings for applications and extension of the work–home resources model to the family domain is elaborated in detail.

This study is among the first to empirically substantiate the long-term adverse consequences of FI and its potential for negatively affecting the work domain by inducing long-term psychological disorder “burnout.”

Employee burnout is increasingly coming under attention due to its negative impact on employee well-being and organisational effectiveness. This study, a systematic review, aims to evaluate the role of servant leadership and its mediators in preventing and mitigating against burnout experiences in organisations.

A preferred reporting items for systematic review and meta-analyses (PRISMA) was conducted using three databases, Academic search Complete, Embase and Scopus, in addition to bibliography searches. Articles were included if they reported on primary data, in English from inception to 2023. The mixed methods critical appraisal tool was used to assess the quality of articles, and a narrative synthesis was used to report results.

The search strategy yielded 4,045 articles, of which (N = 17), with total sample size of (N = 10,444) are included. Findings suggest that servant leadership is predictive of burnout, and that several mediators impact this relationship. Most studies were conducted in health care (n = 8) and banking (n = 3), and while the quality of the studies was mostly high (64%), the methods used were mainly descriptive and cross-sectional, which limits the extent to which causality can be inferred. A theory of change is provided based on the findings from this review and integrated with the extant literature on servant leadership theory, and can be used by organisations to support the policy, training and practice of servant leadership to reduce burnout.

Servant leadership is predictive of burnout; however, further research needs to be undertaken in this important emerging area.

Maintaining a healthy and productive workforce is a challenge for most organizations. This is even truer for health organization, facing staff shortages and work overload. The aim of this study is to identify the resources and constraints that influence managers' mental health and better understand how they are affected by them.

A qualitative approach was chosen to document the resources, the constraints as well as their consequences on managers in their day-to-day realities. The sample included executive-, intermediate- and first-level managers from a Canadian healthcare facility. A total of 62 semi-structured interviews were conducted. The coding process was based on the IGLOO model of Nielsen et al. (2018) to which an employee-related level was added (IGELOO).

Results highlight the importance of considering both resources as well as constraints in examining managers' mental health. Overarching context, organizational constraints and the management of difficult employees played important roles in the stress experienced by managers.

The results offer a better understanding of the importance of intervening at different levels to promote better organizational health. Results also highlight the importance of setting up organizational resources and act on the various constraints to reduce them. Different individual strategies used by managers to deal with the various constraints and maintain their mental health also emerge from those results.

In addition to addressing the reality of healthcare managers, this study supplements a theoretical model and suggests avenues for interventions promoting more sustainable organizational health.

In this viewpoint article, the authors recognize the increased focus in health systems on co-design for innovation and change. This article explores the role of leaders and mangers in developing and enhancing a culture of trust in their organizations to enable co-design, with the potential to drive innovation and change in healthcare.

Using social science analyses, the authors argue that current co-design literature has limited focus on interactions between senior leaders and managers, and healthcare staff and service users in supporting co-designed innovation and change. The authors draw on social and health science studies of trust to highlight how the value-based co-design process needs to be supported and enhanced. We outline what co-design innovation and change involve in a health system, conceptualize trust and reflect on its importance within the health system, and finally note the role of senior leaders and managers in supporting trust and responsiveness for co-designed innovation and change.

Healthcare needs leaders and managers to embrace co-design that drives innovation now and in the future through people – leading to better healthcare for society at large. As authors we argue that it is now the time to shift our focus on the role of senior managers and leaders to embed co-design into health and social care structures, through creating and nurturing a culture of trust.

Building public trust in the health system and interpersonal trust within the health system is an ongoing process that relies upon personal behavior of managers and senior leaders, organizational practices within the system, as well as political processes that underpin these practices. By implementing managerial, leadership and individual practices on all levels, senior managers and leaders provide a mechanism to increase both trust and responsiveness for co-design that supports innovation and change in the health system.

This study aims to broaden the understanding of the mechanisms through which workplace bullying might affect employees’ intention to leave the organisation, as well as the mediating role of burnout in the relationship between workplace bullying and turnover intention.

The sample included 884 employees from different Portuguese organisations operating in the tertiary sector and industry. This study uses structural equation modelling to evaluate the hypothesised model.

The results suggest that workplace bullying causes high levels of burnout in victims and increases their turnover intentions. The results further suggest that burnout fully mediates the effect of workplace bullying on turnover intentions.

Organisations should work to reduce these problems in workplace environments, focusing on HRM models that prevent the precursors of workplace bullying, particularly those associated with low determination of HR practices and the emphasis on employee participation. Implementing workplace ethical guidelines as part of an annual action plan can contribute to cultivating organisational cultures that reject any form of devaluation of human worth within the organisation.

There is little knowledge on the mediating role of burnout in the relationship between workplace bullying and turnover intention. This study answers the call for further empirical research from those who have argued that more information is needed and contributes to the growing debate on this topic and its effects on Portuguese employees. This study seeks to fill these gaps by developing a model of workplace bullying and its consequences and exploring burnout’s potential mediating role.