Expanding Our Understanding Of The Psychosocial Work Environment

"In 1996, NIOSH created the National Occupational Research Agenda to advance occupational safety and health research for the nation. This agenda encompassed 21 priority research areas, including Special Populations at Risk. This priority area was created in recognition of the fact that the nation's increasingly diverse workforce contains many women, older workers, and racial and ethnic minorities. Disparities in the burden of disease, disability, and death are experienced by these groups, due in part to their disproportionate employment in high hazard industries and to certain social, cultural and political factors. This document was developed by the investigators from the University of Massachusetts Lowell at the request of the Special Populations at Risk Team to fill that gap by disseminating to the broader occupational safety and health community a concise and accessible compendium of measures used by health researchers to assess the following domains: racism and racial/ethnic prejudice, sexism and sexual harassment, gender and racial discrimination, work-family integration and balance, support for diversity in the workplace/workforce."--Page iii

There is broad recognition that the psychosocial environment at work can affect physical and mental health as well as organizational outcomes such as work performance and effectiveness. There is a substantial literature linking “job strain” and cardiovascular disease. The economic costs of job strain and job stress in general are related to absenteeism, turnover, and lost productivity, and, although difficult to estimate, could be as high as several hundred billion dollars per year. Thus for social as well as economic reasons, research aimed at understanding the conditions of work that contribute to physical and mental health concerns is well worth an intensified focus. The psychosocial domains studied by occupational health researchers typically include psychological job demands, job control (decision latitude), social support, and intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. These factors, reflecting the organization of the work process, are often used to define the “psychosocial work environment.” However, health and well-being are also affected by other features of the psychosocial work climate, such as unfair or inequitable treatment of employees, sexual harassment, and discrimination. Differential treatment, whether in terms of gender, age, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, or disabilities, is increasingly recognized as a chronic stressor that can affect both psychological and physical health. Experiences of discrimination can operate either in a cumulative way or in combination with each other. Furthermore, they are inherently likely to be distributed differentially by socioeconomic position. Although it appears that discrimination experienced by members of target social groups has detrimental consequences, conceptual approaches and strength of findings vary, methodological problems with the literature have been noted, and the evidence regarding long-term health outcomes is limited to date. Direct links to “upstream” organizational practices (e.g., workplace policies, programs, climate) have rarely been made empirically. Relevant literature is explored in more detail below, to summarize both our knowledge to date and the gaps in the empirical research, as well as to motivate inclusion of these work environment features in future studies. One barrier to such research is the lack of awareness of appropriate measurement instruments. Thus the primary purpose of the current project has been to identify measures of gender and race-related dynamics in the workplace and to make them more easily accessible. Following the brief introduction and literature summary, this document catalogues 46 measures of biases, discrimination, and harassment that may be useful to occupational health researchers who wish to explore these issues further.

Stress is defined as a feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed the personal and social resources the individual is able to mobilize. It can occur due to environmental issues, such as a looming work deadline, or psychological, for example, persistent worry about familial problems. While the acute response to life-threatening circumstances can be life-saving, research reveals that the body’s stress response is largely similar when it reacts to less threatening but chronically present stressors such as work overload, deadline pressures and family conflicts. It is proffered that chronic activation of stress response in the body can lead to several pathological changes such as elevated blood pressure, clogging of blood vessels, anxiety, depression, and addiction. Organizational Stress Around the World: Research and Practice aims to present a sound theoretical and empirical basis for understanding the evolving and changing nature of stress in contemporary organizations. It presents research that expands theory and practice by addressing real-world issues, across cultures and by providing multiple perspectives on organizational stress and research relevant to different occupational settings and cultures. Personal, occupational, organizational, and societal issues relevant to stress identification along with management techniques/approach to confront stress and its associated problems at individual and organizational level are also explored. It will be of value to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students interested in stress management research.

The work environment can be considered one of the main determining factors that can influence the mental health of workers, especially as it regards the structural and organizational conditions to which the worker is subjected. This work environment has positive effects when work provides satisfaction and well-being or negative effects provoked by situations of stress, inadequate working patterns and schedules, possible situations of abuse and/or harassment, etc., which may contribute to the appearance of alterations in the mental health of the worker.

Dedicated to the late Bertil Gardell, a Swedish Social Scientist, this text comprises of 18 essays that shares a common vision - the impact of work on the interconnected processes of stress and disease.

The essential reference for human development theory, updated and reconceptualized The Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, a four-volume reference, is the field-defining work to which all others are compared. First published in 1946, and now in its Seventh Edition, the Handbook has long been considered the definitive guide to the field of developmental science. Volume 4: Ecological Settings and Processes in Developmental Systems is centrally concerned with the people, conditions, and events outside individuals that affect children and their development. To understand children's development it is both necessary and desirable to embrace all of these social and physical contexts. Guided by the relational developmental systems metatheory, the chapters in the volume are ordered them in a manner that begins with the near proximal contexts in which children find themselves and moving through to distal contexts that influence children in equally compelling, if less immediately manifest, ways. The volume emphasizes that the child's environment is complex, multi-dimensional, and structurally organized into interlinked contexts; children actively contribute to their development; the child and the environment are inextricably linked, and contributions of both child and environment are essential to explain or understand development. Understand the role of parents, other family members, peers, and other adults (teachers, coaches, mentors) in a child's development Discover the key neighborhood/community and institutional settings of human development Examine the role of activities, work, and media in child and adolescent development Learn about the role of medicine, law, government, war and disaster, culture, and history in contributing to the processes of human development The scholarship within this volume and, as well, across the four volumes of this edition, illustrate that developmental science is in the midst of a very exciting period. There is a paradigm shift that involves increasingly greater understanding of how to describe, explain, and optimize the course of human life for diverse individuals living within diverse contexts. This Handbook is the definitive reference for educators, policy-makers, researchers, students, and practitioners in human development, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and neuroscience.