Occupational Health Science最新文献

Wellness involves physical, emotional, behavioral, social, and spiritual dimensions. A climate for wellness exists at both the psychological and organizational levels, consisting of individual and shared perceptions of policies, structures, and managerial behavior that support or promote employee wellbeing. This study explored the associations between psychological and organizational wellness climate and the effectiveness of a team health promotion training on employees' perceived physical and mental wellbeing and substance use. Employees from 45 small businesses completed self-report measures of wellness climate, wellbeing, positive unwinding behavior, work-family conflict, job stress, drug use, and alcohol use, assessed before, and one and six months after, attending either of two types of onsite health promotion training. Team Awareness training targeted improvements in the social climate at work. Healthy Choices training targeted individual health behavior. A control group did not receive training until after the study. Businesses were randomly assigned to conditions and data were analyzed using multi-level modeling. Models that included wellness climate as a mediator fit the data significantly better than models without climate as a mediator. Team Awareness participants showed greater improvements in wellness climate and wellbeing compared to the control group. Healthy Choices participants showed no changes in climate and no mediation effects of climate. Health promotion efforts may be enhanced by including wellness climate as a target in program design at multiple levels.

This study investigates the link between intimate partner violence (IPV) and work withdrawal (including absence frequency, partial absenteeism, and turnover intentions) in the context of partners' interference with victims at work and family supportive supervision of victims at work. Using the work-home resources model, we propose that (1) partner interference with victims at work will worsen the relationship between IPV and work withdrawal, and (2) family supportive supervision of victims at work will alleviate this relationship. Our analysis of a sample of 249 female employees found a three-way interaction between IPV, partner interference, and family supportive supervision on victims' absence frequency: IPV victims whose partners interfered with their work had lower absence frequency when they received high (compared to low) levels of family supportive supervision at work. Importantly, family supportive supervision was only related to lower absence frequency when both IPV and partner interference were present. This suggests that organizations have a unique opportunity to reduce the negative effects of IPV and partner interference not only for the victim but also for other employees who are indirectly affected. Our findings have significant implications for organizations, which have ethical, legal, and practical responsibilities to create a safe working environment for all employees.

Researchers have studied loneliness as a modern health epidemic which is associated with myriad negative health effects, yet the literature lacks evidence of loneliness' correlates, including incivility, in the workplace. This paper not only replicates previous work on incivility, a pervasive interpersonal workplace stressor, it also contributes novel findings on the relative importance of loneliness in explaining variance in occupational health outcomes. We tested hypotheses using two cross-sectional datasets containing data from the general working population (Sample 1) and state corrections supervisors (Sample 2). Through relative importance analyses, including relative weights analysis, we found that both general and workplace loneliness explain substantial variance in several outcomes (e.g., emotional exhaustion, depression symptoms, and turnover intentions) relative to the variance explained by workplace incivility. When controlling for perceived work stress, general loneliness appears to be more important than incivility in explaining variance in emotional exhaustion, job satisfaction, and depression symptoms.

Previous research has established the physical and mental benefits of using active workstations like treadmill desks in the workplace, such as reducing sedentary behavior and improving mood. However, treadmill desk use when working at home has not been examined despite significant increases in working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, the objectives of this study were (1) to be the first to describe how treadmill desks are used when working from home and (2) to describe perceived benefits, motivators, and barriers for treadmill desk use when working from home. Twenty participants who worked from home and used a treadmill desk were interviewed between February 2022 and April 2022. Participants reported using their treadmill desks while completing a variety of work and non-work tasks and experienced physical, mental, social, and work-related perceived benefits. Motivators for use included desires to reduce prolonged sitting and be more active, wanting to be healthier and fitter, tracking and reaching goals like daily step counts, feeling good during use, and to overcome increased sedentary behavior due to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Barriers to use included the type of work being done, physical limitations, accessibility issues, social concerns, and mental barriers. Future research should investigate ways to increase treadmill desk use at home by capitalizing on motivating factors and reducing barriers to use.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41542-023-00144-0.

The aim of this study is to investigate whether short, live-streaming activity and relaxation lunch breaks have positive associations with office workers' mood (calmness, valence, and energetic arousal), back pain, and attention after break and whether these associations are mediated by better break recovery. Additionally, we considered the two respite interventions as resources possibly buffering the effects of elevated situational job demands. Ten-minute break exercises were conducted during lunch breaks via Zoom live-stream, and data on those days were compared with data on days on which participants spent their breaks as usual. Our sample of 34 office workers provided data for 277 work days (209 in the home office and 68 on site at the company). Multilevel path models revealed positive total associations of both respite interventions with the mood dimension of calmness. Activity breaks additionally showed a positive association with the energetic arousal dimension of mood, while relaxation breaks were positively related to objectively measured cognitive performance. Interestingly, activity breaks moderated the relationships of job demands with calmness and valence, indicating their function as a stress-buffering resource. There were no significant associations between the two respite interventions and back pain. Supplemented by participants' feedback, the findings of this study suggest that offering short virtually guided break exercises may represent a feasible and office-compatible approach to promote break recovery, mood and functionality at work, especially regarding home-office work. Possible advantages and disadvantages of the live-streaming format are discussed.