Occupational Health Science最新文献

Faculty members are continually confronted with a multitude of activities among which they must divide their time. Prior research suggests that while men and women academics spend the same number of weekly hours working, women tend to expend more time on teaching and service relative to men while men expend more time on research relative to women. Based on cross-sectional survey data from a sample of 783 tenured or tenure-track faculty members from multiple universities, we examine gender differences in time spent in research, teaching, and university service. Regression analyses show that gender differences in time allocation continue to persist after controlling for work and family factors. More specifically, women report more time on teaching and university service than do men, while men report more time spent on research than do women. Results provide evidence that gendered differences in faculty time allocation are robust across time. Potential implications for policy are discussed.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, telework was an established discretionary practice with a considerable amount of research. However, the COVID-19 pandemic forced people who had never worked from home before to do so. Our two-wave descriptive investigation provides a historical snapshot of what approximately 400 teleworkers experienced in the first two to three months of the pandemic. We explored how this experience differed for those who had previously teleworked, those who had children in their home, and those who had supervisory responsibilities. The data exposed telework challenges and pandemic-specific challenges. The results support job crafting theories that teleworkers proactively implement strategies to adjust their boundaries and relationships to meet their need (Biron et al., Personnel Review, 2022). The data also revealed that employees were still struggling two months later, despite implementing strategies like self-care, taking breaks, and psychological reframing. This research provides detailed evidence of how pandemic-induced telework is not the same as traditional telework and some initial evidence of the pandemic-induced telework adjustment time period.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s41542-023-00151-1.

Complex disaster situations like the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) create macro-level contexts of severe uncertainty that disrupt industries across the globe in unprecedented ways. While occupational health research has made important advances in understanding the effects of occupational stressors on employee well-being, there is a need to better understand the employee well-being implications of severe uncertainty stemming from macro-level disruption. We draw from the Generalized Unsafety Theory of Stress (GUTS) to explain how a context of severe uncertainty can create signals of economic and health unsafety at the industry level, leading to emotional exhaustion through paths of economic and health anxiety. We integrate recent disaster scholarship that classifies COVID-19 as a transboundary disaster and use this interdisciplinary perspective to explain how COVID-19 created a context of severe uncertainty from which these effects unfold. To test our proposed model, we pair objective industry data with time-lagged quantitative and qualitative survey responses from 212 employees across industries collected during the height of the initial COVID-19 response in the United States. Structural equation modeling results indicate a significant indirect effect of industry COVID-19 unsafety signals on emotional exhaustion through the health, but not economic, unsafety path. Qualitative analyses provide further insights into these dynamics. Theoretical and practical implications for employee well-being in a context of severe uncertainty are discussed.

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.