• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Research Companion to Organizational Health Psychology

Posted on: Sunday, 2 April 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Thomas, Jay C

Alexander-Stamatios G. Anoniou and Cary L. Cooper (Editors). Research Companion to Organizational Health Psychology. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2005, 696 pages, $255.00 hardcover.

Antoniou and Cooper have prepared an interesting and useful volume. Occupational health psychology has become an area of worldwide research and application and continues to grow in importance. This book captures much of this activity. Chapter authors are from around the world, albeit with a European predominance. The result is a compendium of findings that otherwise would not come to the attention of most scholars. For me, it was an eye opener regarding the top quality of scholarship in this area in countries such as Greece and Spain. If the foundation of science is replication, then replication across cultures and national borders represents the sine qua non of scientific validation. Of course, some theories have not been replicated in so many venues, which leaves open the issue of whether they are valid locally or not valid at all.

There are six parts to the book; three of which are focused on stress. More if you consider that much of Part I, Conceptualization and Framework, is about stress. The other two parts are concerned with burnout and emotional intelligence. Stress is a vastly interesting topic and it has reached the status of an all- encompassing paradigm in medicine and behavioral health. My concern about this is directed at the field, not the book. Does stress explain so much that there are few other factors implicated in occupational health? If not, why is there so little non-stress research? If so, why is there so little agreement about the nature of stress, at least as applied to the workplace? The conclusion from reading several of the chapters in this book is we still do not have a firm theory of job stress and how it impacts health. Maybe that is why several of the chapters emphasize emotions as much as stress.

This is a large book, over 650 pages and 42 chapters. I cannot discuss all of them, so I'll concentrate on the highlights that caught my fancy and start with Kompier and Taris's "Psychosocial Risk Factors and Work-Related Stress: State of the Art and Issue for Future Research" in Part I. Every researcher and consumer of research in organizational psychology should read this chapter because the emperor is shown to be underdressed. The upshot of the chapter is researchers continually apply ever more sophisticated statistical analyses to compensate for inadequate study design. The result is an incomprehensible mess that looks impressive but explains nothing. If the fields of occupational health psychology and organizational psychology are to be taken seriously, this trend must be reversed and soon.

Strangely, for a book entitled Research Companion, the Kompier and Taris offering is the only chapter concerned solely with methodology. The very next chapter, by Magiakou and Chrousos, is on the biological basis of stress-related diseases. They provide an excellent summary of the subject. It is, however, complicated, and the reader can expect to work to fully understand it. Another Part I chapter by Nelson and Simmons brings eustress to the fore and introduces the positive psychology view to occupational health. As a testament to the evolution of psychology, positive psychology concepts appear throughout the book, thus creating some balance between the pathological and potential-oriented views of both stress and health.

Part II is devoted to stress management issues. There is a fairly broad coverage of how we cope with stress, individually and as organizations. A potentially valuable perspective is to think in terms of risk management, as described by Leka, Griffiths, and Cox. This puts job stress on the same level as other dangers to health and safety, and encourages the management of factors that have the highest combination of probability and costs. I also found Locke's short chapter on "Coping with Stress Through Reason" stimulating. Although he aligns with an objectivist philosophy, his approach is consistent with the cognitive-behavioral perspective prevalent in clinical psychology. Unlike the other chapters, Locke presents little in the way of research support for his ideas, but nonetheless the chapter is a good introduction in how cognitive factors can influence responses to external events.

Parts III (Stress in Specific Groups) and IV (Stress, Well- Being, and Health) continue the emphasis on stress. The specific groups are a varied lot and may not grab the interest of every reader. That would be too bad because most of the chapters introduce the impact of the labor market on reactions to stressful conditions. Part IV gets to the bottom line: Does stress impact health and well being? The largest surprise for me was learning about the relationship between stress and psychosocial factors in the development of periodontal disease. Thinking in terms of risk management, organizations that inflict more than tolerable stress on employees may be looking at much higher dental insurance premiums! Most colleagues who are on the road a lot will not be surprised to learn that short-term business travel is stressful and emotionally draining, with occasional highpoints. There is some irony in my reading most of the book while on one of the most taxing and wearying business trips in many years.

"Burnout," the subject matter of Part V, is a concept that has been around for a couple of decades. Originally conceived as a phenomenon in human service workers, it has now been expanded to cover all who work. That has resulted in the evolution of the concept from largely emotional exhaustion to "a crisis in one's relationship with work." Although Leiter and Maslach (Chapter 36) consider burnout a stress phenomenon and incorporate the demand- control model of Karasek and Theorell, others do not (Enzmann, chapter 32). This could result in an interesting interplay of ideas over time. Part V contains chapters that report on studies of burnout in some detail and other chapters that attempt to present variations on the concept. Pines, for example, examines the relationship (moderate across six countries) between occupational burnout and "couple burnout," suggesting there is an inherent connection between the two. She finds the connection in psychoanalytic-existential theory, which I do not find appealing, but I admit she may be on to something as regards burnout as a more general state.

Part VI consists of two chapters on the relationship between emotional intelligence and leadership. I'm not sure how they fit into the theme of the book. Given Zeidner's earlier chapter and other writings that cast significant doubt on the origins and validity of emotional intelligence, they lacked appeal for spending much time reading them.

Overall, this book has a number of strengths that should place it on the "to read" list of many readers of Personnel Psychology. It is up to date, covers a broad range, and is international in scope. I'm still not sure why the title, Research Companion to Organizational Health Psychology, was chosen. I originally thought it might be a sort of handbook for researchers in the field regarding methodology, statistical analysis, measures, and the like. Those topics were present but no more so than in other handbooks. Those who are primary practitioners and not researchers should not be put off by the title-there is a lot in the book that will be of value to them.

Reviewed by Jay C. Thomas, Professor and Director, Counseling Psychology Program, Pacific University, Portland, OR.

Copyright Personnel Psychology, Inc. Spring 2006

Source: Personnel Psychology

More News in this Category