The aging of the industrialized workforce has spurred research on how to support people working later in life. Within this context, the concept of work ability, or an employee's ability to continue ...working in their job, has been introduced as an explanatory mechanism for understanding employee disability, wellbeing, attitudes, and behavior. However, the work ability concept has evolved across disparate literatures with multiple, content-diverse measures and often with little consideration of theory or examination of its nomological network. Using the job demands-resources model as a framework, we present a meta-analytic summary (k = 247; N = 312,987) of work ability's correlates and potential moderators of these relationships. Taken together, we found consistent negative relationships between job demands and work ability, and consistent positive relationships between job and personal resources and work ability. Work ability was also associated with important job outcomes including job attitudes and behaviors such as absenteeism and retirement. Measures of work ability that include both perceived and objective components generally showed stronger relationships than did exclusively perceptual measures, and occupation type was a significant moderator of certain relations between work ability and its correlates. We supplemented this meta-analysis with a primary data collection to examine differences between perceived work ability and the conceptually similar variables of self-efficacy and perceived fit, demonstrating that perceived work ability can explain incremental variance in job- and health-related variables. Our discussion focuses on the value of the work ability construct for both research and practice and future directions for work ability research.
Abstract
Law enforcement agencies are struggling to meet recruitment goals and are rarely representative of the communities they serve. In particular, women make up just 12% of sworn officers despite ...the fact that women officers act in ways that are more consistent with community-oriented policing and use less force. Despite this, there are few evidence-based strategies that agencies can use to improve outreach and messaging efforts focussed on improving candidate diversity. The current study experimentally explored the effectiveness of job advertisements formatted similarly to popular social media platforms (Facebook Ads and short-form videos) and variations on law enforcement officer job descriptions. Results indicated that women-focussed recruitment material significantly improve perceptions of motivation to apply, relevance, and positive perceptions of the material for women participants and that diversity-focussed job descriptions improved perceptions of task and skill variety and diversity climate. These results, however, were only found for video advertising. Agencies should consider tailoring marketing material to meet the needs of different potential applicants and be sensitive to differences in marketing channels.
Purpose:
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initiated the Work@Health Program to teach employers how to improve worker health using evidence-based strategies. Program goals included (1) ...determining the best way(s) to deliver employer training, (2) increasing employers’ knowledge of workplace health promotion (WHP), and (3) increasing the number of evidence-based WHP interventions at employers’ worksites. This study is one of the few to examine the effectiveness of a program designed to train employers how to implement WHP programs.
Design:
Pre- and posttest design.
Setting:
Training via 1 of 3 formats hands-on, online, or blended.
Participants:
Two hundred six individual participants from 173 employers of all sizes.
Intervention:
Eight-module training curriculum to guide participants through building an evidence-based WHP program, followed by 6 to 10 months of technical assistance.
Measures:
The CDC Worksite Health ScoreCard and knowledge, attitudes, and behavior survey.
Analysis:
Descriptive statistics, paired t tests, and mixed linear models.
Results:
Participants’ posttraining mean knowledge scores were significantly greater than the pretraining scores (61.1 vs 53.2, P < .001). A year after training, employers had significantly increased the number of evidence-based interventions in place (47.7 vs 35.5, P < .001). Employers’ improvements did not significantly differ among the 3 training delivery formats.
Conclusion:
The Work@Health Program provided employers with knowledge to implement WHP interventions. The training and technical assistance provided structure, practical guidance, and tools to assess needs and select, implement, and evaluate interventions.
Law enforcement agencies across the country are struggling to recruit qualified candidates and this problem is pronounced when recruiting demographically diverse officers. Women demonstrate ...competencies important for effective policing: restoring trust in police, obtaining high case clearance rates, and using less force. The goal of this study was to understand how agencies use online recruiting materials to recruit women officers. We assessed the frequency of text, images, and videos depicting women and racially and ethnically diverse individuals, and content related to hiring and the job itself. We conducted thematic analysis to understand how policing, the agency, and diversity were portrayed. Characteristics known to discourage women applicants were highlighted prominently in materials. Agencies did not provide consistent messaging about diversity, resources for women, or support for work–life balance. We found differences between agencies with higher and lower percentages of women, but they were inconsistent and often in unexpected directions.
Nearly one in five US employees reports having used cannabis in the past year. As policies and laws regarding cannabis use rapidly change, concerns have arisen over employees' use of cannabis, for ...both medical and recreational purposes. While extant workplace research has not distinguished between types of cannabis users, other studies have found that medical users are clinically and socio-demographically different from non-medical users. This study utilized a sample of employed National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) respondents to examine differences in workplace characteristics and health outcomes among employed medical, recreational, and mixed-use cannabis users. While some differences were initially seen when examining health and work-related outcomes between the groups, several changed after controlling for other important health-related factors. One key difference between the user groups is the higher percentages of medical and mixed-use cannabis users in the construction and mining industries. This study discusses future research needs, as well as practical implications for workers and employers.
This paper builds on a recent meta-analytic review on the relationships between organizational justice and health. Specifically, we examine the moderating role of perceived organizational support ...(POS) on the relationships between organizational justice and three objective cardiovascular health measures, namely, heart rate, systolic blood pressure, and diastolic blood pressure, among a population of 290 public construction workers. The interaction between justice and POS was statistically significant using procedural justice, demonstrating that procedural justice is associated with improvements in the three health outcomes only when POS is relatively high. In other words, higher levels of both procedural justice and POS were needed for reduced heart rate and reduced systolic and diastolic blood pressure. However, the interaction between distributive justice and POS did not significantly relate to the health outcomes. This study makes a contribution to the field by focusing the effects of psychosocial workplace variables on measures of cardiovascular health, and demonstrating an important boundary condition of the relationships between procedural justice and cardiovascular risk factors.
With increasing societal awareness about the adverse impacts of poor mental health on individual and community well-being, there has been a proliferation of scholarship on the need for criminal ...justice practices that are informed by evidence-based behavioral health. The primary focus of this work examines the need for incorporating evidence-based practices in law enforcement responses to vulnerable groups, such as individuals experiencing mental illness or substance use disorders. A lesser focus of the literature has examined the effects of poor behavioral health among criminal justice workers themselves—despite an increased concern to address such issues, both to protect the health and wellbeing of workers as well as the performance and functioning of agencies. We have personally witnessed the impact of occupational stress and poor mental health as a prominent concern among police officers. Officers and police agency staff who participate in our applied research and training and technical assistance projects raise concerns about work-related stress more often than nearly any other topic. This extends beyond our projects focusing on mental wellbeing and stress. Police regularly raise issues of stress, burnout, fatigue, and vicarious trauma in research as varied as police recruitment and retention, diversion or alternatives to arrest, the development of training curricula, and even data systems and technology. These concerns also regularly emerge in discussions among the grantees of various technical assistance efforts. The grantees anecdotally note the negative impacts of vicarious traumatization and organizational stressors on their programs’ functioning and ability to retain a strong and stable workforce. It is clear that these health and wellness issues are pervasive and affect all aspects of police work. They also lead to chronic turnover and understaffing, compounding the existing burdens on remaining staff. The extant research corroborates this story. In this article, we move beyond anecdotal impressions of research participants, evaluation partners, and technical assistance recipients. By reviewing scientific findings across several areas of literature, we formulate a conceptual argument for how behavioral health concerns among law enforcement may be linked to collateral impact on policepublic contact. Much research on law enforcement has substantiated the high prevalence of stress along with the range of associated behavioral health concerns. But we will demonstrate that little research has worked to connect these well-established concerns with changes in decision-making, discretionary behaviors, and outcomes related to police officers’ public-facing behavior. There is a vast clinical literature that points to the potential adverse impacts of poor behavioral health not just on individuals’ well-being, but also on cognition, attitudes, social behaviors, and performance. We argue that this gap in the literature presents an important missed facet of discussions of U.S. policing and police reform. The remainder of this article will be divided into the following parts. In Part II, we overview the literature on the high prevalence of occupational stress and traumatic exposure among U.S. law enforcement. Part III outlines what is known about the vast impact of stress and related deteriorations for individual health, professional performance, and behavioral outcomes relevant to the policing profession. Part IV overviews the limited ways in which police officers’ behavioral health has been directly linked with job performance, particularly in relation to public-facing behavior. In Part V, we provide guidance for researchers on addressing knowledge gaps related to officer behavioral health and performance. Specifically, we make recommendations for fostering stronger researcher-practitioner relationships that can sustain research endeavors, suggesting specific areas of research, and leveraging specific methodological choices that have the potential for making large contributions to this area of research. We conclude the article, in Part VI, offering thoughts arguing for the need for an inclusive conceptualization of policing and behavioral health that acknowledges the intertwined nature of police and community behavioral health.
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