• News |  
• Articles |  
• Psychology research uncovers link between workplace culture and mental health outcomes in high stress industries

Psychology research uncovers link between workplace culture and mental health outcomes in high stress industries

Employees on the frontlines are routinely placed in high stress, high pressure situations. First responders, military members, and, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many health care workers find themselves in stressful, dangerous, and volatile situations.

“One of the expectations of this population is that they are highly resilient individuals,” explains Dr. Gargi Sawhney, an occupational health psychology researcher at Auburn University.

With a workplace expectation of resiliency, Sawhney says many individuals may avoid reporting mental health symptoms.

In this episode of the “Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know” podcast, Dr. Sawhney discusses the serious impact that poor mental health can have on employees. Additionally, she breaks down the coping strategies that her research found to be successful in mitigating mental health symptoms and the key things organizational leaders can do to best support their employees.

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Frontline careers can be not only physically, but emotionally draining. Members of the military, firefighters, police officers, nurses, and others are among those on the very front lines battling not only danger in the line of duty, but a mental health battle that can follow. 67% of firefighter fatalities in 2014 can be attributed to stress and overexertion. Reports from the federal government estimate that 20 to 30% of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan struggle with PTSD. So now we're faced with a question, what can be done to protect those whose job it is to protect us? Welcome to the fifth episode of The Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know Podcast. Joining me today is Dr. Gargi Sawhney, she is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at Auburn University and focuses her research on mental health particularly in high stress careers. Thank you for joining the podcast today.

Gargi Sawhney:

Absolutely, glad to be here.

Speaker 1:

So I want to start with some context. Over the last five to 10 years, mental health has become something that is much more common to talk about in everyday life. And I mentioned a few statistics in the intro but I want to dig a little deeper. As far as mental health and high stress careers go, is this a new issue and how big of an issue is it?

Gargi Sawhney:

So it's certainly not a new issue. If you look at the research dating back to the 1970s, 1980s, you'll see research that assessed mental health issues among Vietnam veterans, and they looked at PTSD depression among these Vietnam veterans. More recently, the focus has been on stress in general, mostly because it costs organizations a lot of money. If you look at things like job satisfaction, performance of employees within the workplace, their commitment, turnover intentions, these are all affected by the stress that they experience. The American Psychological Association started conducting a stress in America survey about a decade or so ago and part of that focuses on stress in the workplace. So it's certainly a prevalent issue not just in the high risk industries, but really across the board across various occupations at this point.

Speaker 1:

So definitely an issue and something needs to be done to address it. So I want to dig into your work on mental health in the military specifically. One of the things you talk about is the impact that the climate in the military has on mental health. Explain that.

Gargi Sawhney:

So if you think of the military context, you are talking about a high stress, high risk occupation where these soldiers are exposed to traumatic events on a regular basis. I wouldn't say on a day-to-day basis, on a daily basis, but on a very regular basis, which can then lead to mental health issues amongst this population. One of the expectations essentially of this population is that these are highly resilient individuals both physically and mentally, and if they experience mental health issues there's a chance that they're not willing to report it because there's that expectation that they're supposed to be strong. So the idea behind climate is that if your organization, your squad, your unit, has a climate that encourages you to seek treatment when you have mental health issues, you're more likely to get mental health treatment.

So in one of the studies that we published, my collaborators and I looked at the supportive unit climate for seeking treatment, and it was related to favorable beliefs, positive beliefs about seeking treatment among soldiers. It was related to a reduced perception that seeking mental health treatment would have any negative consequences for their careers or that these people would be treated differentially. So certainly very, very helpful in terms of building that climate within the organization, within the unit, within the squad.

Speaker 1:

Very interesting. So you discussed in your study some of the different strategies that military members may use to cope. What are those and how effective did your study find those to be?

Gargi Sawhney:

So one of the things that, within the coping literature there are three main types of coping strategies or buckets of coping strategies, if you may. One of them is problem-focused coping, which is typically the most effective coping strategy. This is really just managing the problem that you have on hand. So let's say hypothetically you have a deadline that's approaching and you still have a lot of work to do, problem-focused coping would then mean that you're seeking help from your colleagues, potentially asking for an extension or putting in more hours. So you're really trying to manage the problem at hand. And this coping strategy tends to be the most effective. Emotion-focused coping, which is another form of coping strategy, somewhat effective, is that instead of focusing on the problem or trying to manage the problem, you're now trying to manage your emotions.

So maybe you're picking up the phone, you're calling a friend, a family member, and complaining about how much work there is, or just trying to get their support, but really not doing anything about getting that work done in a timely manner. And then you have avoiding coping, which is really just not thinking about the stress at all, avoiding it at every cost. In the military context, what we've seen is that problem-focused coping tends to fall flat. It doesn't really have a positive effect because there's really not much that the soldiers can do to manage the problem. If you're in combat, there's really not much in terms of managing the stressor that you have. Instead, we find that emotion-focused coping tends to be far more effective in helping individuals cope as well as reduce some of their mental health symptoms. We've seen a decline in PTSD among soldiers that were situated in Iraq and Afghanistan, if they engaged in emotion-focused coping their PTSD symptoms declined.

Speaker 1:

Wow, very impressive. So clearly there's a problem and you just laid out there's a clear leader in terms of the coping strategies to help manage these mental health issues. So let's get really practical for a moment. How do we institutionalize a culture of support for seeking out mental health services? If you're talking to the Secretary of Defense or a general or a chief, what do you tell them? How do they manage this within their ranks?

Gargi Sawhney:

I think one of the things that needs to be acknowledged is that these are high stress occupations and mental health issues will arise sooner rather than later. And having that culture, encouraging people to talk about mental health issues as and when these are being experienced. Creating a culture within the workplace where people feel safe and secure to talk about the issues that they're experiencing can really have a beneficial effect. In one of the studies that we conducted, this was with a firefighter population, but I think some of the results are still very relevant, is that when firefighters engaged in stress related talks, talking about the stress that they were experiencing with their supervisor, with their coworkers, they were less likely to experience mental health symptoms.

So we know that this culture can have beneficial effects. Also, having employee assistance programs, having a counselor on site, if there is an issue that arises, the individual feels safe to go in and talk to them. So I think a lot of this really just boils down to the culture of the organization, of the team in which an individual is employed when we're talking about high risk occupations.

Speaker 1:

So we've talked about the military, you mentioned some of your work with firefighters, people of these high stress careers really are critical to public safety, to our national defense. What are the potential risks that we face for not taking their mental health as seriously as say, for example, their physical health?

Gargi Sawhney:

So there are severe consequences when we don't take the mental health of individuals that are in occupations like firefighters, police officers, military, very seriously because these are individuals that are tasked with keeping the general population safe. When you have individuals in these positions that are not mentally fit, what we tend to see is that these individuals are not able to provide the necessary services in an effective manner. And this is not just focused on these three occupations, but it also extends to other high risk occupations. Think about healthcare workers for a second. Being in the midst of a pandemic where these healthcare workers are highly burnt out, they're experiencing high mental health issues and are providing care to some of our critically ill patients. It's a little concerning in that if these individuals are not mentally fit, they would not be able to provide the necessary care. So certainly an issue that needs to be taken into account, mental health is something that needs to be taken extremely seriously.

Speaker 1:

Well, I want to thank you so much for joining this episode of the podcast. Your research is so interesting and I really look forward to seeing how leaders across industries are able to implement these insights and strategies to better protect our first responders, military members, healthcare, et cetera. For all of our listeners, make sure that you subscribe to the podcast so you can be notified each time we drop a new episode. And be sure to hit that five star button. It helps us more than you know. We'll see you next time on The Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know Podcast.

The Things You Didn't Know You Didn't Know is a production of the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University. To learn more about our faculty's life-changing research, visit cla.auburn.edu.

Tags: Psychological Sciences Research