Occupational Health Psychology – Gegenstand, Modelle, Aufgaben

[Health-promoting work design for telework in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic]

BACKGROUND

The contact restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have led many companies to allow their employees to work from home for infection control reasons.

OBJECTIVE

This literature review explores the question in what way health-promoting work from home can be excercised.

RESULTS

Working from home requires consideration of the same guidelines just like those for office and computer workstations. To prevent negative mental and physical stress reactions, an ergonomic workstation design is recommended. Furthermore, the organization of working time (structuring the working day, adhering to breaks and regeneration units, and avoiding disturbances and interruptions) is of great importance for a health-promoting work design at home.

CONCLUSION

Important components of a health-promoting work design are temporal, spatial and mental separation of work and private life. Employees and their individual needs must be taken into account when designing a health-promoting workplace at home; however, the responsibility for implementing health-promoting work design mostly lies solely with the employees due to the ad hoc change of workplace.

Is Transformational Leadership Healthy for Employees? A Multilevel Analysis in 16 Nations

This study examines the potential health promoting and hampering effects of transformational, contingent reward and laissez-faire leadership across 16 countries with a multi-source dataset comprising 93,576 subordinates in 11,177 teams of a large international company. We analyze how leadership climate strength, defined as the shared perceptions of employees concerning their supervisor's leadership behavior, affects individual employees' health and if leaders who are both transformational and transactional have more healthy employees (augmentation effect). In addition, we investigate how national power distance moderates these relationships. The results of multi-level analysis provide strong support for the health promoting effect of transformational leadership ( r = .16 to r = .50), contingent reward ( r = .14 to r = .48) and the health hampering effect of laissez-faire leadership ( r = -.15 to r = -.43) within the analyzed 16 nations. Having a strong transformational leadership climate is also associated with better perceived health in eight countries. Finally, the augmentation effect was significant in six countries and we also found, as expected, that a high power distance strengthens the health promoting effects of transformational leadership. Overall, this study indicates that having a shared vision as well as clear goals, roles and rewards at work is important for promoting employees' health worldwide.