Total Worker Health: strategies, climate, and employee motivation.

Details

• Personal Author:
  Schwatka, Natalie V.
• Description:
  Employee engagement is a critical component of how a business develops and implements Total Worker Health (TWH) strategies, including policies and programs. Safety and health climates (perceptions of company commitment through consistency between espoused vs. enacted strategies) is also an important engagement factor. Organizational resources, defined in the present study as both business safety/health strategies and safety/health climates, are fundamental to TWH. Through organizational resources, businesses aim to facilitate the engagement that is necessary to produce desired outcomes of better health, safety, and well-being. Employee motivation is an indicator of engagement. Previous research indicates that safety/health strategies and climates are key motivation factors. However, Gagne et al. argue that it is important to differentiate between autonomous and controlled types of motivations, as opposed to total motivation, as each differentially impact performance and well-being. In the present study we evaluate three kinds of motivation - intrinsic, identified regulation, and external motivation. Understanding how TWH strategies and climate are related to different types of motivations is novel. We assess how both health protection and health promotion constructs can contribute to a stated need to better understand the benefits of a TWH approach. Additionally, we assess multiple climates as well as the combined effect of strategies and climate on motivation. Methods. We measured safety (e.g., hazard control) and health (e.g., stress management program) strategies with the online Health Links™ Healthy Workplace Assessment. An individual from the represented organization including executives, human resource professionals, health and safety professionals, and other administrators completed the assessment. Employee data was collected through a health and safety culture survey. This survey used Lee et al.'s safety climate measure, Zweber et al.'s health climate measure, and an adapted Conchie et al.'s safety motivations measure that assessed the three kinds of safety motivations and the three kinds of health motivations. We used linear mixed models with a random intercept for organization to test the hypothesized relationships between strategies, climates, and motivations. Our outcome variables were the three safety motivations and the three health motivations. We first evaluated the associations between safety climate and the three safety motivations independently (H1a) as well health climate and the three health motivations independently (H1b). Second, we evaluated the associations between safety strategies and the three safety motivations independently (H2a) as well as health strategies and the three health motivations independently (H2b). Next, we evaluated the associations between both safety climate and safety strategies (H3a) and health climate and health strategies (H3b) with each of the three safety and three health motivations independently using multivariable models. To test the synergistic effect of climate and strategies, we included an interaction term. We controlled for tenure, management role, organizational size, and industry. Due to the number of multiple comparisons, we set our significance level to 0.001. All data analyses were performed using SAS Software Version 9.4. Results. Our study sample represented 1,052 workers from 36 businesses. Half worked in the service industry (53%). Respondents were on average 40 years old, college educated (63%), non-Hispanic white (79%), female (64%), and 42% had supervisor duties. Safety motivation. We observed that safety climate was related to all three types of safety motivation (H1a). For example, every one-point increase in safety climate resulted in safety intrinsic motivation increasing by 0.27 points on a five-point scale, 95% CI [0.21, 0.33]. The magnitude of the coefficients was not practically different by type of motivation. Safety strategies were not significantly related to safety motivations as hypothesized (H2a). Additionally, the addition of the interaction term between safety climate and safety strategies was not statistically significant (H3a). Health motivation. We observed that health climate was related to all three types of health motivation (H1b). For example, for every one-point increase in health climate, health intrinsic motivation increased by 0.26 points on a five-point scale, 95% CI [0.20, 0.31]. The magnitude of the coefficients was not practically different by type of motivation. Health strategies were not associated with health motivation as hypothesized (H2b). Additionally, the addition of the interaction term between health climate and health strategies was not statistically significant (H3b). Conclusions/practical implications. Our study indicates that safety/ health climates are associated with multiple types of motivation to participate in TWH strategies, which is consistent with safety climate research. However, strategies were not related to motivation indicating that what organizations are doing to engage employees are not directly associated with how motivated employees are to participate. Future research should investigate the ways in which strategies are measured as well as the quality of strategies. Next steps could also include an investigation of the interaction between health and safety (e.g., do safety/health climates interact to influence safety/health motivations?). In practice, our findings suggest that businesses can increase employee safety/health motivations through consistently communicating the importance of TWH to employees and ensuring TWH policies are used in practice. [Description provided by NIOSH]
• Subjects:
  Health Promotion Occupational Health Safety
• Keywords:
  TWH; Total Worker Health; Work organization; Safety climate; Employee satisfaction; Health promotion
• Publisher:
  American Psychological Association
• Document Type:
  Text
• Funding:
  Cooperative Agreement
• Genre:
  Abstract or Summary
• Place as Subject:
  Colorado ; OSHA Region 8
• CIO:
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH)
• Topic:
  Workplace Safety & Health
• Location:
  North America
• Pages in Document:
  213-214
• NIOSHTIC Number:
  nn:20065777
• Citation:
  Work, Stress and Health 2019, November 6-9, 2019, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2019 Nov; :213-214
• Federal Fiscal Year:
  2020
• NORA Priority Area:
  Manufacturing ; Services
• Performing Organization:
  University of Colorado Denver, Aurora
• Peer Reviewed:
  False
• Start Date:
  20160901
• Source Full Name:
  Work, Stress and Health 2019, November 6-9, 2019, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• End Date:
  20260831
• Collection(s):
  National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health
• Main Document Checksum:
  urn:sha-512:e5e5c973f92063c10f56d33d9b26f404f3488ef13feafda81f8a695468eb7bc519d8e39f147eccf5013164630f91b8389c59bfdb6137ae02072304a3bef4a090
• Download URL:
  https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/249547/cdc_249547_DS1.pdf
• File Type:
  [PDF - 114.92 KB ]