Workplace Well-being: How to Build Psychologically Healthy Workplaces

Preface

One of the trends of the 21st century is the notion of a healthy workplace. Although this concept is not new—the influential Work in America report is more than 30 years old and the NIOSH statement on work stress is nearly 25 years old (Sauter, Murphy, & Hurrell, 1990)—the suggestion that work can, and should, foster individual health has only recently become firmly ensconced in the corporate lexicon. A Google search of the phrase “healthy workplace” resulted in 43 million hits. Researchers have articulated models of healthy work (e.g., Grawitch, Gottschalk, & Munz, 2006; Kelloway & Day, 2005; Warr, 1987), and practitioner guidelines or “best practices” are readily available for organizations that wish to implement healthy workplace programming (see, e.g., http://www.healthy-workplace.org/bestpractices.html).

As researchers and practitioners, we applaud these efforts. The focus of most of our professional work is on the development of healthy workplaces, and we see this book as a natural outgrowth of these activities. Specifically, our intent in establishing this collection was to provide a comprehensive overview of the concept of psychologically healthy workplaces. To do so, we contacted leading figures in occupational health psychology and asked them to summarize the theory, empirical evidence, and organizational practices that lead to healthy work and healthy workplaces.

Each author, or team of authors, was asked to address a unique aspect of the healthy workplace, ...