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Hospitals within the United States consistently have injury rates that are over twice the national employee injury rate. Hospital safety studies typically investigate care providers rather than support service employees. Compounding the lack of evidence for this understudied population is the scant evidence that is available to examine the relationship of support service employees’ perceptions of safety and work-related injuries. To examine this phenomenon, the purpose of this study was to investigate support service employees’ perceptions of safety leadership and social support as well as the relationship of safety perception to levels of reported injuries.

A nonexperimental survey was conducted with the data collected from hospital support service employees (n=1,272) and examined: (1) relationships between safety leadership (supervisor and organization) and individual and unit safety perceptions; (2) the moderating effect of social support (supervisor and coworker) on individual and unit safety perceptions; and (3) the relationship of safety perception to reported injury rates. The survey items in this study were based on the items from the AHRQ Patient Safety Culture Survey and the U.S. National Health Care Surveys.

Safety leadership (supervisor and organization) was found to be positively related to individual safety perceptions and unit safety grade as was supervisor and coworker support. Coworker support was found to positively moderate the following relationships: supervisor safety leadership and safety perceptions, supervisor safety leadership and unit safety grade, and senior management safety leadership and safety perceptions. Positive employee safety perceptions were found to have a significant relationship with lower reported injury rates.

These findings suggest that safety leadership from supervisors and senior management as well as coworker support has positive implications for support service employees’ perceptions of safety, which, in turn, are negatively related to lower odds of reporting injuries.

Organizational researchers studying well-being – as well as organizations themselves – often place much of the burden on employees to manage and preserve their own well-being. Missing from this discussion is how – from a human resources management (HRM) perspective – organizations and managers can directly and positively shape the well-being of their employees. The authors use this review to paint a picture of what organizations could be like if they valued people holistically and embraced the full experience of employees’ lives to promote well-being at work. In so doing, the authors tackle five challenges that managers may have to help their employees navigate, but to date have received more limited empirical and theoretical attention from an HRM perspective: (1) recovery at work; (2) women’s health; (3) concealable stigmas; (4) caregiving; and (5) coping with socio-environmental jolts. In each section, the authors highlight how past research has treated managerial or organizational support on these topics, and pave the way for where research needs to advance from an HRM perspective. The authors conclude with ideas for tackling these issues methodologically and analytically, highlighting ways to recruit and support more vulnerable samples that are encapsulated within these topics, as well as analytic approaches to study employee experiences more holistically. In sum, this review represents a call for organizations to now – more than ever – build thriving organizations.

This chapter builds on previous research that conceptualized organizational politics as an organizational stressor. After reviewing the studies that integrated the occupational stress literature with the organizational politics literature, it discusses the negative implications of the use of intimidation and pressure by supervisors, implications that have generally been overlooked. Specifically, the chapter presents a conceptual model positing that the use of intimidation and pressure by supervisors creates stress in their subordinates. This stress, in turn, affects subordinates’ well-being, evident in higher levels of job dissatisfaction, job burnout, and turnover intentions. The stress also reduces the effectiveness of the organization, reflected in a high absenteeism rate, poorer task performance, and a decline in organizational citizenship behavior. The model also maintains that individual differences in emotional intelligence and political skill mitigate the stress experienced by subordinates, resulting from the use of intimidation and pressure by their supervisors. In acknowledging the destructive implications of such behavior in terms of employees’ well-being and the productivity of the organization, the chapter raises doubts about the wisdom of using it, and advises supervisors to rethink its use as a motivational tool. Implications of this chapter, as well as future research directions, are discussed.

The malicious impulse is a phenomenon that lies in the theoretical and ontological space between emotion and action. In this chapter, we probe this space. In the empirical part of this work, we evaluate the hypothesis that middle-level supervisors will be more likely than non-supervisory workers and top-level supervisors to report an impulse to “hurt someone you work with” (i.e., maliciousness).

Data are from a cross-sectional survey of a representative sample of employed Toronto residents in 2004–2005.

Results from logistic regression analyses show that when job characteristics are controlled, the estimated difference between middle-level supervisors and workers in other hierarchical positions reporting the impulse to harm a coworker is statistically significant. Moreover, the difference between middle-level supervisors and other workers persist after controls for anger about work and job-related stress.

In discussing our results, we focus on factors that might generate the observed associations, and on how Bourdieusian theory may be used to interpret the social patterning of impulses in general, and malicious impulses in particular. We also discuss the implications of our findings for emotional intelligence in the workplace.

Organizational approaches to racial inequality have provided contextual insight into a host of traditional stratification outcomes (e.g., hiring, earnings, authority). This chapter extends the organizational approach by drawing on the health-stress framework to explore how organizational context affects experiential and health-related outcomes – discrimination, social support, and psychological distress. Drawing on a sample of Black workers in the United States, we examine the relationship between workplace racial composition and psychological distress, as well as two potential mediators – racial discrimination and workplace social support. Our findings reveal that psychological distress is similar for Black workers in token (<25% Black coworkers), tilted other race (25–49.99% Black coworkers), and tilted same race (50–74.99% Black coworkers) job contexts. Workers in Black-dominated jobs (>75% Black coworkers), however, experience significantly less psychological distress than other compositional thresholds, net of individual, job, and workplace characteristics. This relationship is not explained by either racial discrimination experiences or supervisor and coworker social support. This finding suggests that researchers need to theorize and examine other protective factors stemming from coworker racial similarity.

This chapter aims to provide nuance into the issue of generational cohort differences at work by focusing on the role of contextual moderator variables. Theory and hypotheses derived from the research on generational differences, psychological contracts, and work values are contrasted to a countervailing set of hypotheses derived from theory and research on the confluence of age and Person-Environment (P-E) fit. Complex patterns of interactive effects are posited for both alternatives. The results favored a generational hypothesis regarding the positively valenced construct of job satisfaction but an age-based hypothesis for the negatively valenced construct of turnover intentions. Results are tested using a subset from a large and nationally representative sample of adults from the US workforce (n = 476). Results offer mixed support for both age and generational cohorts, qualified by the specific type of outcome at hand.

This chapter critically examines the dynamics that exists between workplace violence, employee well-being, and governance as experienced and perceived by employees in the Forestry context. The purpose of this research is to explore what signals the prevalence of workplace violence in the Forestry sector; to understand the consequences of workplace violence; to explore the degree to which workplace violence can be stopped; and how can employers strive for a violence “free” and healthy workplace. This chapter focuses on research into workplace violence in the Forestry sector in British Columbia, Canada.

A questionnaire survey, telephone interviews, and focus groups were used to focus on managers, union, and employees' verbal accounts of their own experiences and perceptions of workplace violence. Managers completed 367 questionnaire surveys. The union and employees from across five different organizations also completed the survey that was analyzed. Twenty semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with each interview lasting 60–75 minutes, tape-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Two focus groups were the one with 15 managers only and the other with 10 union representatives. Each focus group lasted 45–60 minutes, tape-recorded, and transcribed verbatim.

This research adopted an interpretivist approach, which allows a positivist and an interpretivist viewpoint that examines situations to establish the norm by using questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups. The mixed methodology is appropriate for addressing the research aims and provided insight into the lifeworld of participants, providing the opportunity for managers, union, and employees to share their personal experience of workplace violence. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) provided insight into the lifeworld of participants, providing the opportunity for employees, managers, and union representative to share their personal experience of workplace violence and its implications for governance, violence prevention, and employee well-being at work.

The data revealed that 13 key themes emerged as salient to forestry workers' perspective of workplace violence, the prevalence of violence, consequences of violence, prevention of violence, and how employers can strive toward a violent “free” and healthy workplace. These themes include Stress Management, Mental Health, Leadership Development, Trust, Employee Involvement and Engagement, Communication and Collaboration, Education and Training, Employee Violence Assistance Program, Violence Response Protocol, Respectful Workplace Culture, Job Redesign, Fear of Change, and Employee Appreciation. This research has relevance for employee well-being, leadership, governance, corporate social responsibility, and performance for practitioners and academics alike. The findings and insights from this research can be extrapolated to other organizations inBritish Columbia, Canada, and other parts of the world.

This chapter explores what managers in the library and information science workplace can do to keep stress and burnout levels low. The literature on stress and burnout in human services, or the helping professions, is surveyed and the differences between the two phenomena are explained. Research is clear that keeping stress levels low and burnout at bay in the workplace benefits both employees and the organization. Even so, managers are given little training on how to identify and deal with stress and often fail to notice that their employees are chronically stressed. When managers become aware that they do have employees who are seriously stressed or burned out, they are often unsure whether they should address the problem and how to handle it. The author explains the differences between stress and burnout and clarifies how managers can minimize their negative impact by monitoring six areas in which workers are most likely to experience them: (1) the demands of the job which include the quantity of work and the knowledge required to perform; (2) the amount of control employees are permitted to exercise in the workplace; (3) the amount of the social support employee’s feel they have from managers and colleagues; (4) the quality of workplace relationships; (5) the clarity of one’s role on the job; and (6) support and honest communication during times of change. The practical implication of this information aimed at managers is to help them create a better workplace and mentally and physically healthier staff members.