Enhancing Workers’ Well-Being. Scientific and social relevance of managing stress in the workplace

Purpose. Despite work-related stress is one of the most studied topic in organizational psychology, many aspects as for example the use of different measures (e.g. subjective and objective, qualitative and quantitative) are still under debate. According to this, in order to enhance knowledge concerning which factors and processes contribute to create healthy workplaces, this thesis is composed by four different studies aiming to understand: a) the role of relevant antecedents (e.g. leadership, job demands, work-family conflict, social support etc.) and outcomes (e.g. workplace phobia, absenteeism etc.) of work-related stress; and b) how to manage psychosocial risk factors in the workplace. The studies. The first study focused on how disagreement between supervisors and their employees on leadership style (transformational and transactional) could affect workers well-being and work team variables. The second and third study used both subjective and objective data in order to increase the quality of the reliability of the results gained. Particularly, the second study focused on job demand and its relationship with objective sickness leave. Findings showed that despite there is no direct relationship between these two variables, job demand affects work-family conflict, which in turn affect exhaustion, which leads to absenteeism. The third study analysed the role of a new concept never studied before in organizational settings (workplace phobia), as a health outcome in the JD-R model, demonstrating also its relationship with absenteeism. The last study highlighted the added value of using the mixed methods research approach in order to detect and analyse context-specific job demands which could affects workers’ health. Conclusion. The findings of this thesis answered both to open questions in the scientific literature and to the social request of managing psychosocial risk factors in the workplace in order to enhance workers well-being.

Digital-based interventions for teams in the workplace

This research project investigated a digital workplace intervention based on team coaching and social network visualisation. The investigation was carried out through four studies. Study 1 was a systematic literature review with a realist synthesis approach about workplace digital interventions at multiple levels, highlighting the need for more research about group-level digital workplace interventions. Study 2 was a qualitative needs assessment exercise that verified the fit between the targeted organisations and the selected intervention. Following the tailored implementation of the intervention, Study 3 analysed recipients’ positive perceptions of intervention characteristics, with usability and integrity being appreciated the most, and acceptability being appreciated the least. While the intervention was considered usable and recipients felt valued during sessions, training did not fully meet their expectations. Also, recipients’ perceptions did not change from second to fourth session, suggesting they remained stably satisfied with the intervention over time. Finally, Study 4 tested two relevant Context-Mechanism-Outcome (CMO) configurations and suggested that teams implementing action plans developed during training might need less support from immediate managers to coordinate collective efforts and accomplish collective performance. Moreover, peer support towards training transfer was confirmed as a relevant contextual factor contributing to intervention effectiveness. Overall, this multifaceted and complex research project offers a nuanced examination of team-level digital interventions within the contemporary workplace, unveiling valuable insights and opportunities for further refinement and application.