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This study addresses a gap in evidence on small employer experiences of managing mental health problems in the workplace. The authors gathered first-hand experiences of small business managers to empirically investigate how the small business context affects the management and support of mental health problems in the workplace, and the practice implications that arise.

Qualitative interviews, combining semi-structured and narrative approaches, with 21 small business managers with experience of managing employees with mental health difficulties. The 21 managers recounted a total of 45 employee cases, which were analysed thematically, using a case-based matrix. Study participants were drawn from small businesses within England and Scotland (UK). Interviews were conducted between November 2019 and February 2020.

Support aligned with current understanding of effective practice, yet was often informal, instinctive and flexible. Accommodating employees with mental health problems impacted the workload of managers and co-workers, and business operation and growth. Challenges and tensions reflected the difficult balancing act faced by managers in organisations of all sizes. However, the intensity and immediacy of cross-pressures was enhanced for small businesses, due to their smaller workforce and lack of dedicated Human Resource Management and occupational health expertise.

Guidance should address the navigation of day-to-day management and support for employees with mental health difficulties, including approaches to balancing the needs of the wider workforce and business operation. Access to HR and occupational health expertise is valuable. Financial subsidies may be of lesser concern to small businesses.

This study offers originality in focusing exclusively on small business managers with first-hand experience of supporting employees with mental health problems. Findings challenge the perception that small firms have unique experiences, whilst highlighting contextual features that exacerbate intensity and immediacy of impacts.

Managers play a crucial role in organizations. They make decisions that directly influence organizational success and significantly impact employees’ mental health, development and performance. They are responsible for ensuring the financial well-being and long-term sustainability of organizations. However, their mental health is often overlooked, which can negatively affect employees and organizations. This study aims to address managers’ mental health at work, by examining specifically the direct and indirect effects of identity verification on their psychological distress and depression through self-esteem at work. The study also aims to examine the moderating as well as moderated mediation effects of identity salience.

A sample of 314 Canadian managers working in 56 different companies was studied, using multilevel analyses.

The findings showed that the verification of managers’ identity vis-à-vis recognition is positively associated with psychological distress and depression. Self-esteem completely mediates the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis work control and psychological distress, and also the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis work control and superior support and depression, while it partially mediates the association between low identity verification vis-à-vis recognition and depression.

This study can also help both managers and human resource management practitioners in understanding the role of workplaces in the identity verification process and developing relevant interventions to prevent mental health issues among managers at work.

This study proposed a relatively unexplored approach to the study of managers’ mental health at work. Its integration of identity theory contributes to expanding research on management and workplace mental health issues.

Mental health conditions such as depression are prevalent in working adults, costly to employers, and have implications for legal liability and corporate social responsibility. Managers play an important role in determining how employees’ and organizations’ interests are reconciled in situations involving employee mental ill-health issues. The purpose of this paper is to explore these situations from the perspective of managers in order to develop theory and inform practice in workplace mental health promotion.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 24 Australian managers who had supervised an employee with a mental health issue. Interview transcripts were content analyzed to explore themes in managers’ experiences.

Managing an employee with a mental health issue involves becoming aware of the issue, taking action to understand the situation and develop an action response, implementing the response and managing the ongoing situation. Each of these tasks had a range of positive and negative aspects to them, e.g., managing the situation can be experienced as both a source of stress for the manager but also as an opportunity to develop greater management skills.

Understanding line managers’ experiences is critical to successful implementation of HR policies regarding employee health and well-being. HR strategies for dealing with employee mental health issues need to consider implementation support for managers, including promotion of guiding policies, training, emotional support and creating a psychosocial safety climate in their work units or teams.

The insights gained from this study contribute to the body of knowledge regarding psychosocial safety climate, an emergent theoretical framework concerned with values, attitudes and philosophy regarding worker psychological health. The findings also have important implications for strategic human resource management approaches to managing mental health in the workplace.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions of private and public sector managers in Barbados regarding the concepts of mental health and illness at work. It also explored their interactions and experiences with persons with mental illness at work and various forms of support and resources needed to improve the overall management of these persons within the organisational setting.

This qualitative study used an exploratory research design based on two focus groups of private and public sector managers.

The findings revealed that both private and public sector managers understood the distinction between the concepts of mental health and mental illness. However, managers believed that high levels of stigma and discrimination exist in both private and public sector workplaces due to a lack of understanding of mental illness, cultural norms, and socialisation in Barbados regarding mental illness and negative stereotypes. However, workplace education and promotion, associated workplace policies, and employee assistance programmes (EAPs) were identified as key strategies for effectively addressing issues of mental health stigma and the management of persons with mental illness at work.

Due to the qualitative approach used and small sample selected based on non-probability sampling, generalising the findings to larger populations is heavily cautioned.

Organisations in both private and public sectors should emphasise workplace mental health interventions such as mental health education and awareness, the development and implementation of supportive and flexible policies, and EAPs. These strategies are likely to help destigmatisation efforts and enhance managers’ understanding of mental health and the management of persons with mental illness.

This study provided a rich and in-depth understanding of mental health and illness from the perspective of private and public sector managers in a small developing country in the Caribbean. The Caribbean region possesses a dearth of empirical research concerning issues of mental health and illness at work.

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.

Mental health conditions are common in the working population. Every organisation should have a comprehensive strategy that not only promotes mental health and provides effective return to work support but that proactively responds to mental ill health in the workplace at an early stage. This will bring about better health for people and save costs for organisations.This article outlines the scale of the issue and draws on leadership research to explore how this could be used in the workplace to build a culture able to respond to and manage mental health effectively at work. It outlines how the Centre for Mental Health (formerly the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health) has addressed some of these issues by working with the Australian charity, beyondblue: the national depression initiative. The Centre has made beyondblue's highly successful National Workplace Programme available in the UK in order to build management competencies so that managers have the skills, knowledge and confidence to act.

Peer support work is increasingly becoming part of the delivery of health and social care services. However, in an Irish context, there is a paucity of research in this area. This study aims to investigate the experiences of peers and other key stakeholders across four sectors in Ireland.

Qualitative interviews (N = 35) were conducted with key respondents in mental health, substance use, migrant health and homelessness sectors. Data were analysed using thematic analysis and reported using an ecological framework.

Peer work is a slowly emerging area of practice, although mental health is further ahead in this journey. Findings suggest that peers are important additions to service delivery but also have various support and development needs. Organisations can encourage and support peers into employment through enacting human resource policy and practices, effective supervision, management and maintaining a positive working culture. Helping other professionals to understand the peer role and how it can function within the wider team is highlighted. National policy and governance structures can also support the emergence of the peer role, which exists in a highly complex arena.

Peers can play a meaningful role in supporting service users in four sectors of health and social care in Ireland. Structures and processes to help embed these roles into systems are encouraged across micro, meso and macro levels. Implications and limitations are discussed for moving forward with peer work.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to include these four areas of practice simultaneously.

This study aims to examine the individual and contextual predictors of managerial attitudes toward employees with chronic depression (EwCD) in the hospitality and tourism field, the relationship between managerial attitudes toward EwCD and levels of organizational citizenship behavior, and the mediating role of personality in this relationship.

Empirical data were collected through an online survey of 305 managers working in the hospitality and tourism industry in the USA. SmartPLS 3 software was used to conduct a partial least squares-structural equation modeling analysis.

Organizational and individual characteristics of managers, such as pressure to be productive in the workplace, previous experience with depression, levels of anxiety and personality characteristics, are strong predictors of attitudes toward employees with depression. Personality mediates the effect of managers’ attitudes toward organizational citizenship behavior.

The study provided support that managers who have experienced depression are more understanding of the needs of EwCD and, consequently, can reduce related stigma in the workplace. Likewise, open and agreeable managers who do not feel the constant pressure to showcase high performance and who score low on anxiety and high on organizational citizenship behavior can create a safe working environment free from prejudice and discrimination toward EwCD.

Examining depression in the hospitality and tourism industry becomes even more critical as mental health issues are increasing in the workplace. This research contributes to the hospitality and tourism literature, which seldom investigates managerial perspectives of mental illness and sheds light on the desirable managerial personality traits necessary for creating an inclusive workplace.

Examines the sources of stress associated with high levels of job dissatisfaction and mental health among practice managers and women general practitioners, and compares the job satisfaction, mental health and job stress among practice managers and women general practitioners. Women general practitioners (n = 75) and practice managers (n = 51) completed anonymous questionnaires. Lack of communication and co‐operation between colleagues and staff were the main sources of dissatisfaction and lack of mental wellbeing for both groups. In addition, wishful thinking coping factor was predictive of job dissatisfaction and mental ill‐health. There was no significant difference between practice managers and women general practitioners on the mental health scale. Women general practitioners experienced less job satisfaction with regard to the amount of work, and hours of work than the practice managers. There may be substantial benefit in initiating a support network system for these professionals.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the impact of a trauma-informed care (TIC) training programme on practice at the individual and workplace level in mental health and drug and alcohol services and to examine the implications of using training alone as a strategy for achieving system-level practice change.

A total of 271 clinicians and managers from public mental health and drug and alcohol services in Western Australia who had undertaken TIC training were invited to complete an on-line survey 12 months after training. Individual survey items were based on a five-point Likert scale with opportunity being provided for additional comments from respondents.

One year post-training, both clinicians and managers reported that training had increased their awareness and knowledge and had a positive impact on their attitudes towards TIC. Clinicians reported a moderate impact on their individual practice and both groups reported very limited success in bringing about change in their workplaces. Workforce development and organisational factors were identified by both clinicians and managers as being barriers to implementation.

Only 30 per cent of the training participants responded to the survey and it is not possible to determine whether they differed from non-respondents. Findings were based on a self-report survey with no objective measure of behaviour change.

This “naturalistic” study examines the longer-term impact of training, from the perspective of clinicians and managers, on changing practice at the individual clinician and workplace level. It highlights the critical importance of understanding and addressing contextual factors where collective, coordinated behaviour change is needed in order to effect organisational change.