Supporting Sleep

The Importance of Social Relations at Work

M. Nordin

• Éditeur: Palgrave Pivot
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137437853
• Sujet: Psychology
• Sous-sujet: Applied Psychology

Social support and sleep are both health promoting factors and important in the prevention of illness and sick-leave. Promoting healthy work by providing good conditions for strong social relationships and by preventing bullying or harassment can improve sleep and consequently employee health, increasing work productivity and efficiency overall.

Part I

Background

1

The Importance of Work

Abstract: This chapter presents the working life in which social support occurs. Work is important since, among several reasons, belonging to a group is crucial for well-being. Social support is a health-bringing psychosocial work factor and is important in the demand-control-support model, the effort-reward imbalance model, the job demands-resources model, and other psychosocial work factor models. The importance of organization, leadership, and followership is presented, as are health consequences of a poor psychosocial work environment. Gender aspects are also of interest since men and women are found in different workplaces and at different positions at work. Moreover, men and women differ in work-related health. Finally, the consequences on work environment of the change from an industrial society to a knowledge-intense society are mentioned.

Keywords: followership; health promotion; leadership; organization; psychosocial work factors

Nordin, Maria. Supporting Sleep: The Importance of Social Relations at Work. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137437853.0003.

This book is about two prominent health factors: social support and sleep. These are factors to take into consideration in everyday life, but this book places them in a work setting. Except for the family, the work group is presumably the most important group in our lives, and belonging to a group is of utmost importance. The workplace is also a large arena for health promotion.

Without the group, we would not survive, neither on the savannah nor in cyberspace. Being a slow and weak animal with no such benefits as long fast legs, great fangs, or excellent night vision, human beings were very vulnerable in the earliest stages of our evolution. However, by living together in groups, we gained benefits that increased the possibilities for our survival. Contributing to the group created feelings of belongingness, which in turn gave rise to feelings of being confirmed, cared for, and loved, but foremost the group provided safety (Aronson, 2011), a basic human need (Maslow, 1954). The strong link to the group is reflected in the importance of social support at work, since being at work entails interacting with coworkers and supervisors. Besides fulfilling the needs of belonging, work provides economic safety and possibility for development and identification. Most of us are affected by work for a substantial part of our lives. Thus, it is important to have knowledge about how work affects health.

We spend many hours together with our coworkers and supervisors in the completion of work tasks. As such, work is often rewarding and satisfying. However, work has also always been linked to injury and disease. The physical exposure due to work used to be the villain, but many physical demands have successfully been battled by the aid of modern technology, and limits for toxic chemical exposure have been established. Nevertheless, work is still a risk factor of ill health. Today, the most prominent risk factor is spelled stress which most often is due to the psychosocial work environment (Allvin et al., 2011).

When work places demands on us that exceed our resources at hand, we experience stress, and one of the first things to be affected by such an imbalance is sleep (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). If we are exposed to stress over a long period of time without the possibility to recover, our bodies and minds will be worn out by the wear and tear that stress imposes (McEwen, 1998). Therefore, it is important to investigate work and how its positive and negative attributes affect its employees – that is, us.

Organization and psychosocial work factors

To understand work, we must start in the organization. It is important to remember that an organization would be nothing without its members, its employees. Organizations are social constructs and consequently complex (Ahrne, 1994). Structure is needed in order to know who should do what, where, and when. The organization establishes structure by delegating control, decisions, coordination, and production and dictating whether the work should or could be performed at the workplace or at home, during the day or the night. The organization also creates cultural values in the form of norms, goals, and visions that serve as guides for production. Moreover, the organization is always acting in a context, and its interaction with the surrounding world influences both its structure and culture over time (Mintzberg, 1983).

How to best organize work depends on the goals and purposes of the organization, and various organizational models have been suggested over time. Many countries have made the move from an industrial society with hierarchical organizations and centralized leadership to a knowledge-intense society with a dominant service sector characterized by flat organizations and a diffusion of responsibilities (Allvin et al., 2011).

The change in organizational needs due to the development into a knowledge-intense society has had consequences for what we are exposed to at work, because how work is organized affects working conditions (Bolin, 2009). Social support, for instance, has been reported to be perceived to a higher degree in organizations in which the team takes more responsibility for the work progress (flat organizations) compared to organizations in which responsibility is centered on one or a few supervisors (hierarchical organizations). However, when dividing social support into different types and sources of support, support from the supervisor is reported to a larger extent in hierarchical organizations (Bolin & Höckertin, 2010). Thus, social support may trickle through the organization in different ways depending on the organization’s structure. In a hierarchical organization, it is clear who the supervisor is, and support from the supervisor is needed for the completion of work. In a flatter organization, in which the team is in charge, good communication and cohesion are important factors to achieve and maintain. These are factors that tie coworkers together and create a good climate from which coworker support arises (Allvin et al., 2011). Therefore, social support may be portrayed differently and be accessible through different sources in different organizations.

Social support is an important psychosocial work factor, and it is included one way or another in the research on the psychosocial work environment, even though attention is most often paid to other psychosocial factors such as demand and control. The most referenced theoretical model for investigating the psychosocial work environment is the demand-control-support model (Karasek & Theorell, 1990). This model states that experiencing high demand in combination with low control over what job to perform and how to perform it (job strain or work stress) is associated with an increased risk of ill health that is as serious as cardiovascular disease (Kivimäki et al., 2012). High demand in combination with high control characterizes active jobs in the model. These jobs give the employees the opportunity to develop, since an adequate amount of demand is stimulating if counterbalanced with high control. Achieving goals that have required effort to reach makes us feel accomplished and successful, and this achievement provides both self-esteem and health. High control and low demand is a combination also associated with health, but these jobs may not be as stimulating as active jobs. Combining low demand and low control gives rise to jobs characterized by passivity and boredom (which also can be stressful; Frankenhaeuser, 1994). The initial demand-control model was complemented with social support after Johnson, Hall, and Theorell’s study (1989) showed the importance of social support that, when interacting with control, had an effect on cardiovascular disease (see Chapter 2).

Another well-investigated theoretical model on psychosocial work environment is the effort-reward imbalance model (ERI model; Siegrist, 1996). The effort dimension in this model resembles the demand dimension in the demand-control-support model. However, the reward dimension differs clearly from the control dimension in that it focuses on reward, confirmation, support, and possibility to advance at work. The model also contains a dimension of inner demands termed work overcommitment (WOC). This dimension includes, for example, not being able to quit thinking about work even when not working. It seems that these inner demands are more detrimental to sleep quality than are demands from work (Åkerstedt et al., 2012), but whether they are modified by social support or not has never been investigated.

Demerouti and colleagues (2001) took on a more holistic approach on the psychosocial work environment when they formulated the job demands-resources model (JD-R model). They refer to demands as aspects that have to be done at work and claim that these are to be contrasted with the resources, both organizational and individual, at hand. Resources are the aspects of work and individual competence that reduce demand and the physiological and psychological costs associated with them. The resources help to reach work goals and stimulate personal growth, learning and development. Social support is, by definition, a resource against demand as it buffers against stress (see Chapter 2).

All in all, the organization is important for the development and maintenance of the psychosocial work environment. For example, a poor work environment characterized by high demand and poor leadership increases the risk of bullying (Agervold & Gemzøe Mikkelsen, 2004). However, it is not only the responsibility of the organization to provide a good work environment. As previously said, organizations are social constructs that we are all part of. We recreate the social construct of the organization by our behavior, which means that the organization is changeable. Therefore, we all have the responsibility to make sure that the organization’s goal is carried out, and it is in this work context that we become part of the creation, development, and maintenance of the psychosocial work environment. The psychosocial work environment occurs in the interaction between our striving toward a goal and the organization’s demand on us to reach it. Therefore, the psychosocial work environment needs to be taken into consideration at all times. We are each other’s psychosocial work environment, and we create it together – however, supervisors must take the lead.

Leadership and followership

Supervisors are the extended arms of an organization. They are responsible for conveying and implementing the organization’s structure and culture and for assigning work so that the organization’s goals are achieved. Supportive leadership is increasingly emphasized as good for the work environment (Kuoppala et al., 2008; Skakon et al., 2010). In the transformational leadership style (Bass, 1990), which is considered to be one of the most successful styles, social support is an important aspect, along with engagement, visionary thinking, and consideration.

Supportive leadership behavior is one of the most important parts of good leadership. Followers who have considerate and supportive supervisors report better health, better well-being, and lower stress (Larsson, 2010; Skakon et al., 2010), less sick leave taken (Kuoppala et al., 2008), and a lower incidence of cardiovascular disease (Nyberg et al., 2009) compared to their counterparts who perceive low or no support from their supervisor. In fact, poor or no support from the supervisor is related to bullying at work (Salin, 2008).

Leadership is not the only ingredient in creating a good and supportive work environment, though. Supervisors cannot be leaders without followers, and leadership depends on a relationship with them. Therefore, followers also need to take responsibility for a functioning leadership. Leaders and followers are constantly in interaction, and in this interaction, an atmosphere and group dynamic is created. If it is positive and stimulating, both work satisfaction and productivity will flourish, as will health. Originating in the Scandinavian work model that builds on consensus and participation, a philosophy and theory on followership was formulated by Hällstén and Tengblad (2006). According to this theory, a coworker is expected to contribute to the work environment and organization by being responsible and active. In return, the coworker is rewarded with the opportunity to develop by learning, collaboration, and challenge. This, in turn, will lead to participation and engagement, two key concepts in work health promotion (e.g., Hanson, 2004). In the theory of followership, the supervisor’s role is to support and facilitate the coworkers’ activity and to encourage responsibility. Thus, the supervisors and coworkers all have a role in establishing a good work environment. What characterizes a good work environment may differ from one organization to another, but among the key aspects are positive, accessible, and fair leaders; a positive psychosocial climate; support; good collaboration; confirmation; and well-developed communication (Lindberg & Vingård, 2012). All these aspects can be referred to the concept of social support.

The theory of followership highlights the responsibility of both supervisor and coworker behavior. Work demands that employees behave according to what is required in order to get the work tasks completed. This means that everybody in an organization needs to be fit for the task and for maintaining social relations. Sleep is one factor that has proven to be important, not least in social relations (Gordon & Chen, 2014). Thoughts, attention, and emotions are more difficult to regulate when a person is sleep-deprived. This can have serious consequences not only for the completion of work tasks but also for behavior among employees. In fact, deviant behavior and hostility are common consequences of sleep deprivation as self-regulation deteriorates (Christian & Ellis, 2011). Moreover, we are more vulnerable to negative social influences when sleep-deprived, which makes us more likely to follow others’ bad behavior (Welsh et al., 2014). This may have consequences for bullying at work.

Occupational health

Health at work has garnered quite a lot of attention. Health is more than just the absence of disease; the view on health has progressed from one where illness was explained by a somatic process (the biomedical model) to one that takes on a holistic perspective and includes both biological, psychological, and social factors (the biopsychosocial health model). Thus, health is a complex and multidimensional concept that implies that an individual’s health is affected not only by biological and physiological imbalances but also by the social environment, how the person interprets this environment, and sensations that the body signals (Engel, 1981).

Exposure to an adverse psychosocial work environment may lead to stress, and the relation between psychosocial work environment and health has been in focus for several decades. The psychosocial work environment is an aspect of work that is not as clear-cut as, for instance, the physical work environment, since it is based on the individual’s perception, which depends on both dispositions and personal experience. Therefore, it is not possible to assign a cut-off point that fits everyone to say how much adverse psychosocial work environment an individual should be exposed to in order to remain healthy. Nevertheless, the psychosocial work models, especially the demand-control-support and ERI models, have been shown to be related to several diseases and conditions such as cardiovascular disease (Kivimäki et al., 2012; Thayer et al., 2010), depression, exhaustion syndrome (burnout; SBU, 2014a), back pain (SBU, 2014b), and sleep disturbance (Linton et al., 2015). Systematic literature reviews show that evidence of the impact of social support on health, such as depression, exhaustion syndrome, back pain, and sleep, are still limited though (SBU 2014a; 2014b; Linton et al., 2015; Van Laethem et al., 2013). However, the research to date shows that low social support from the supervisor and coworkers increases the risk of depressive symptoms and exhaustion syndrome and that the risk increase is about the same magnitude for both men and women. Low social support from coworkers also increases the intake of anti-depressive medication (SBU, 2014a). In back pain, social support from the supervisor seems to be the most crucial source of support. Low supervisor support increases pain, whereas adequate support decreases it (SBU, 2014b).

In stressful and non-supportive environments with poor leadership and poor psychosocial environment, bullying is more likely to occur. These environments are characterized by low social support, which may be a part of the association between bullying and serious diseases. Bullying is related to depression, anxiety, negative affectivity (Hansen et al., 2006), cardiovascular disease (Kivimäki et al., 2003), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; Birkeland et al., 2015). PTSD, in turn, is strongly related to poor sleep, with up to 91 per cent reporting difficulties falling asleep and having nightmares (Maher et al., 2006).

The labor force is sex-segregated in many countries. Not only do men and women work in different branches with different work tasks (vertical segregation), they also work in different positions (horizontal segregation), with men more often inhabiting the higher positions in the organization. In a report from the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (2014), occupations typically held by women, such as nursing, midwifery, and teaching, were characterized by poor psychosocial work environments. Simultaneously, holders of these occupations had the highest sick-leave rates. On the other end of the scale, the best psychosocial environment and the lowest sick-leave rates were found in the building sector, a typically male-dominated sector. However, men in the female-dominated organizations displayed a similar sick-leave pattern, due to psychosocial work factors, as their female colleagues. This paints a picture of systematic relationship among the or...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  Background
• Part II  Theoretical Framework
• Part III  Empirical Findings
• Part IV  Discussion and Conclusions
• References
• Index