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Acute and chronic pain affects more Americans than heart disease, diabetes, and cancer combined. Conservative estimates suggest the total economic cost of pain in the United States is $600 billion, and more than half of this cost is due to lost productivity, such as absenteeism, presenteeism, and turnover. In addition, an escalating opioid epidemic in the United States and abroad spurred by a lack of safe and effective pain management has magnified challenges to address pain in the workforce, particularly the military. Thus, it is imperative to investigate the organizational antecedents and consequences of pain and prescription opioid misuse (POM). This chapter provides a brief introduction to pain processing and the biopsychosocial model of pain, emphasizing the relationship between stress, emotional well-being, and pain in the military workforce. We review personal and organizational risk and protective factors for pain, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, optimism, perceived organizational support, and job strain. Further, we discuss the potential adverse impact of pain on organizational outcomes, the rise of POM in military personnel, and risk factors for POM in civilian and military populations. Lastly, we propose potential organizational interventions to mitigate pain and provide the future directions for work, stress, and pain research.

Despite widespread interest in the gig economy, academic research on the topic has lagged behind. The present chapter applies organizational theory and research to compose a working model for understanding participation in the gig economy and how gig work may impact worker health and well-being. Drawing from past research this chapter defines the gig economy in all its diversity and advances a framework for understanding why individuals enter into gig economy. Next, the authors discuss how various characteristics of the gig economy and gig workers can be understood as both demands and resources that influence how gig work is likely to be experienced by the individual. To understand how these characteristics are likely to influence worker health and well-being, we draw from past research on alternative work arrangements and entrepreneurship, as well as the limited extant research on the gig economy. Finally, a research agenda is proposed to spur much needed research on the gig economy and its workers.

A key feature of performance in many professions is that of vigilance, carefully monitoring one’s environment for potential threats. However, some of the characteristics that may make someone successful in such work may also be more likely to make them fail in the long-term as a result of burnout, fatigue, and other symptoms commonly associated with chronic stress. Among these characteristics, neuroticism is particularly relevant. To exert the effort that vigilance work requires, sensitivity to threats, a core aspect of neuroticism, may be necessary. This is evidenced by higher rates of neuroticism in vigilance-related professions such as information technology (IT). However, other aspects of neuroticism could attenuate performance by making individuals more distractible and prone to burnout, withdrawal, and emotional outbursts. Four perspectives provide insight to this neuroticism–vigilance paradox: facet-level analysis, trait activation, necessary conditions, and job characteristics. Across these perspectives, it is expected that too little neuroticism will render employees unable to perform vigilance tasks effectively due to lack of care while too much neuroticism will cause employees to become overwhelmed by work pressures. Contextual and personological moderators of the neuroticism–vigilance relationship are discussed, as well as two behavioral styles expected to manifest from neuroticism that could explain how neuroticism may be associated with either good or bad performance-relevant outcomes.

This chapter provides valuable insights around the entrepreneurial landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as the inherent stressors that may impact entrepreneurial well-being and performance. As the World Health Organization declares stress as the epidemic of the twenty-first century, entrepreneurs face increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous contexts, or what the Army War College refers to as “VUCA” environments. In these contexts, traditional models of leadership and stress management in entrepreneurship require tapping into new, sometimes previously untapped and underdeveloped resources. Resources such as Psychological Capital (Luthans, Youssef-Morgan, & Avolio, 2007), Algorithmic Leadership (Harms & Han, 2018), and wearable biometric technologies (Tsuji, Sato, Yano, Broad, & Luthans, 2019) that exploit big data analytics powered by artificial intelligence will be invaluable to entrepreneurs as they manage stress, and build and maintain their competitive edges.

Stress and the military go hand-in-hand, particularly in combat environments. While some personality traits or types weaken relationships between stress and performance, others, such as psychopathy, may strengthen them. In the present chapter, we consider the ramifications of individuals with high levels of psychopathy or psychopathic tendencies in the military with regard to both their own stress and performance and that of those around them. We discuss different reactions to psychological and physical stress, as well as the implications of psychopathic tendencies as they relate to current military issues, including gender, leadership, teamwork, turnover, post-traumatic stress disorder, and suicide. By juxtaposing relevant research findings on stress and psychopathy, we conclude that psychopathic tendencies should have neither uniformly negative nor positive effects on stress and performance in the military. Rather, effects on such individuals and the peripheral others with whom they interact will likely vary greatly depending on numerous factors.

In recent years, a wide range of psychosocial health interventions have been implemented among military service members and their families. However, there are questions over the evaluative rigor of these interventions. We conducted a systematic review of this literature, rating each relevant study (k = 111) on five evaluative rigor scales (type of control group, approach to participant assignment, outcome quality, number of measurement time points, and follow-up distality). The most frequently coded values on three of the five scales (control group type, participant assignment, and follow-up distality) were those indicating the lowest level of operationally defined rigor. Logistic regression results indicate that the evaluative rigor of intervention studies has largely remained consistent over time, with exceptions indicating that rigor has decreased. Analyses among seven military sub-populations indicate that interventions conducted among soldiers completing basic training, soldiers returning from combat deployment, and combat veterans have had, on average, the greatest evaluative rigor. However, variability in mean scores across evaluative rigor scales within sub-populations highlights the unique methodological hurdles common to different military settings. Recommendations for better standardizing the intervention evaluation process are discussed.

Prior research has documented a generally positive relationship between employees’ standing on constructs that are commonly studied by positive psychologists and workplace outcomes, such as job performance and retention. Constructs such as adaptability, empowerment, hope, optimism, and resilience are believed to reflect psychological resources that employees can draw upon when facing adversity and challenges in their work, while also reflecting a general tendency or disposition to experience positive emotions and engage with others in ways that reflect such positive emotions. As such, positive psychology constructs may be particularly important for performance in jobs characterized by high levels of social interaction, stress, and challenge. In order to explore the manner in which different positive psychology constructs are related to sales performance, this chapter presents findings from a meta-analytic investigation into the relationships between sales performance and a variety of positive psychology constructs. Findings based on data from 59 unique samples and 14,334 salespeople indicate that some positive psychology constructs exhibit moderate to even strong relationships with the performance of salespeople, although the strength of these relationships appears to have been substantially inflated by common-source bias. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for selection and training within sales occupations, and advance an agenda for future research.