Developing Workplace Interventions to Stimulate a Healthy Working Life for All [PhD Project]
Stress is a major adversary in the pursuit of long, healthy lives. Of all encountered stressors, job strain plays a substantial role throughout the adult lifespan.
It is related to psychological health outcomes like burnout, and the incidence of somatic illness, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and low-back pain. Besides, job strain also poses major costs to companies and societies, affecting productivity and health care costs.
As a result, governments and organizations are increasingly interested in improving employee health, and some organizations have introduced vitality policies to support their employees in using healthier working habits and lifestyles. However, we do not know whether these policies actually work, and what works best for whom.
Identifying how their impact differs between different age groups and within the older employee cohort is of great importance, because there is evidence that while physical health outcomes decrease, psychological health outcomes improve with age. In addition, physical and psychological challenges of older workers often develop at much earlier age due to physically or cognitively demanding jobs, with too little employee involvement, and/or unhealthy lifestyles.
Consequently, individual differences in health outcomes further increase with age. We aim to identify personal and work-related factors that benefit psychological (i.e., vigor, exhaustion) and physical health outcomes (i.e., cardiovascular risk score, presence of prediabetes) among different age cohorts. Within the older age cohort we also aim to develop and test tailored interventions that improve health outcomes. We do so by combining the knowledge from the fields of Human Resource (HR) and Health Psychology.
Cross-cutting themes
The Herbert Simon Research Institute for Health, Well-being, and Adaptiveness is a research center devoted to carrying out excellent, state of the art research in order to contribute to healthy and resilient people. We have selected three themes, which involve the collaboration between various Departments and address actual themes in need of both fundamental and applied research.