Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers.Schonfeld, I.S., & Chang, C.-H. (2017). Occupational health psychology: Work, stress, and health. New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company.Houdmont, J., & Leka, S. (2010). An introduction to occupational health psychology. In S. Leka & J. Houdmont (Eds.). Occupational health psychology (pp. 1–30). John Wiley: Hoboken, NJ.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Occupational Health Psychology (OHP). OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, workfamily balance, workplace violence and other forms of job-related mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions designed to improve and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational (I–O) psychology,Everly, G.S., Jr. (1986). An introduction to occupational health psychology. In P.A. Keller & L.G. Ritt (Eds.), Innovations in clinical practice: A source book (Vol. 5, pp. 331–338). Sarasota, FL: Professional Resource Exchange. historical evidence suggests that the origins of OHP also lie in occupational health/occupational medicine.Hurrell, J. J., Jr., & Sauter, S. L. (2023). The origins of occupational health psychology: Another look. In L. E. Tetrick, G. G. Fisher, M. T. Ford, & J. C. Quick (Eds.), Handbook of occupational health psychology (pp. 23–41). American Psychological Association. For many years the psychology establishment, including leaders of I–O psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, creating a need for the emergence of OHP.
OHP has also been informed by other disciplines. These disciplines include sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families.Tetrick, L.E., & Quick, J.C. (2011). Overview of occupational health psychology: Public health in occupational settings. In J.C. Quick & L.E. Tetrick (Eds.), Handbook of occupational health psychology (2nd ed., pp. 3–20). Washington DC: American Psychological Association. For example, the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimated that exposure to long working hours, a risk factor extensively studied by researchers allied to OHP, led 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016. The impact of long work days is likely mediated by occupational stress, suggesting that less burdensome working conditions are needed to better protect the health of workers.
Historical overview
Origins The Industrial Revolution prompted thinkers, such as Karl Marx with his theory of alienation,Marx, K. (1967/1845). The German ideology. In L.D. Easton & K.H.L. Guddat (Eds. and Trans.), Writings of the young Marx on philosophy and society. Garden City, NY: Doubleday. to concern themselves with the nature of work and its impact on workers. Taylor's (1911) Principles of Scientific ManagementTaylor, F.W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. Norwood, MA: The Plimpton Press.Christie, A., & Barling, J. (2011). A short history of occupational health psychology: A biographical approach. In C. Cooper & A. Antoniou (Eds.), New directions in organizational psychology and behavioural medicine (pp. 7–24). Washington, DC: Gower Publishing. as well as Mayo's research in the late 1920s and early 1930s on workers at the Hawthorne Western Electric plantMayo, E. (1933) The human problems of an industrial civilization. New York: MacMillan. helped to inject the impact of work on workers into the subject matter psychology addresses. About the time Taylorism arose, Hartness reconsidered worker-machine interaction and its impact on worker psychology. Republished by Hive Publishing Company as Hive management history series no. 46, The creation in 1948 of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan was important because of ISR's research on occupational stress and employee health.Institute for Social Research. (2016). History. Research Center for Group Dynamics. Research Center for Group Dynamics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.Quinn, R.P. et al. (1971). Survey of working conditions: Final report on univariate and bivariate tables, Document No. 2916-0001. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.House, J.S. (1980). Occupational stress and the mental and physical health of factory workers. Ann Arbor: Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan.
Research published in the 1950s and extending to the 1970s helped lead to the emergence of OHP. For example, in the U.K. Trist and Bamforth (1951) found that the reduction in miner autonomy that accompanied organizational changes in English coal mining operations adversely affected morale.Trist, E.L., & Bamforth, K.W. (1951). Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal getting. Human Relations, 14, 3–38. Arthur Kornhauser's work in the early 1960s on the mental health of automobile workers in MichiganKornhauser, A. (1965). Mental health of the industrial worker. New York: Wiley. also contributed to the development of the field.Christie, A. & Barling, J. (2011). A short history of occupational health psychology: A biographical approach. In C. Cooper & A. Antoniou (Eds.), New directions in organizational psychology and behavioral medicine (pp. 7–24). Washington, DC: Gower Publishing.Zickar, M.J. (2003). Remembering Arthur Kornhauser: Industrial psychology's advocate for worker well-being. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88, 363–369. A 1971 study by Gardell examined the impact of work organization on mental health in Swedish pulp and paper mill workers and engineers.Gardell, B. (1971). Alienation and mental health in the modern industrial environment. In L. Levi (Ed.), Society, stress and disease (Vol. 1, pp. 148–180). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Research on the impact of unemployment on mental health was conducted at the University of Sheffield's Institute of Work Psychology. In 1970 Kasl and Cobb documented the impact of unemployment on blood pressure in U.S. factory workers.Kasl, S.V., & Cobb, S. (1970). Blood pressure changes in men undergoing job loss: A preliminary report. Psychosomatic Medicine, 32(1), 19–38.
Recognition as a field of study Several individuals are associated with independently creating the term "occupational health psychology" or "occupational health psychologist."Schonfeld, I.S. (2018). Occupational health psychology. In D.S. Dunn (Ed.), Oxford bibliographies in psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. They include Ferguson for his 1977 conference paperFerguson, D. (1977, Nov.). The psychologist and occupational health. Proceedings of the Annual Conference, Ergonomics Society of Australia and New Zealand. Adelaide. and 1981 publication,Ferguson, D. (1981). Occupational Health in Australia - Debit and Credit. Community Health Studies, 5(1), 63‐70. Feldman (1985)Feldman, R.H.L. (1985). Promoting occupational safety and health. G. Everly & R.H.L. Feldman (Eds.), Occupational health promotion: Health behavior in the workplace (pp. 188–207). New York: Wiley. and his colleague Everly (1986), and Raymond, Wood, and Patrick (1990).Raymond, J.S., Wood, D., & Patrick, W.K. (1990). Psychology doctoral training in work and health. American Psychologist, 45, 1159–1161. In 1988, in response to a dramatic increase in the number of stress-related worker compensation claims in the U.S., the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) "recognized stress-related psychological disorders as a leading occupational health risk" (p. 201).Sauter, S.L., Hurrell, J.J., Jr., Fox, H.R., Tetrick, L.E., & Barling, J. (1999). Occupational health psychology: An emerging discipline. Industrial Health, 37(2), 199–211. With the increased recognition of the impact of job stress on a range of problems, NIOSH found that their stress-related programs were significantly increasing in prominence. In 1990, Raymond et al. argued in the widely read American Psychologist that the time has come for doctoral-level psychologists to get interdisciplinary OHP training, integrating health psychology with public health, because creating healthy workplaces should be a goal for psychology.
Emergence as a discipline With its appearance in 1987, Work & Stress is the first and "longest established journal in the fast developing discipline that is occupational health psychology."Cox, T., & Tisserand, M. (2006). Editorial: Work & Stress comes of age: Twenty years of occupational health psychology. Work & Stress, 20, 1–5. Three years later, the American Psychological Association (APA) and NIOSH jointly organized the Work, Stress, and Health Conference in Washington, DC, the first international conference devoted to OHP."Milestones in the history of occupational health psychology", (February 2002). Monitor on Psychology, American Psychological Association. 33(2). Retrieved July 28, 2014. The conference has since become biennial.Barling, J., & Griffiths, A. (2011). A history of occupational health psychology. In J.C. Quick & L.E. Tetrick (Eds.), Handbook of occupational health psychology (2nd ed., pp. 21–34). Washington, D.C., American Psychological Association. In 1996, the first issue of the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology was published by APA. That same year, the International Commission on Occupational Health created the Work Organisation and Psychosocial Factors (ICOH-WOPS) scientific committee,Work Organisation and Psychosocial Factors. International Commission on Occupational Health. which focused primarily on OHP. In 1999, the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology (EA–OHP) was established at the first European Workshop on Occupational Health Psychology in Lund, Sweden.Houdmont, J. (2009). Across the pond: A history of the European Academy of Occupational Health Psychology. Newsletter of the Society of Occupational Health Psychology, 7, 4–5. That workshop is considered to be the first EA–OHP conference, the first of a continuing series of biennial conferences EA–OHP organizes and devotes to OHP research and practice.