Your Boss, Your Health

According to many polls, the #1 reason for quitting a job is the boss. Management consultant and author Greg Smith created an entire article on the Top Ten Reasons Why People Quit Their Jobs in which every item was something that management does to drive staff away! Some of the reasons? "Management doesn't allow the rank and file to make decisions or allow them pride of ownership," "Management shows favoritism and gives some workers better offices, trips to conferences, etc." and "Management promotes someone who lacks training and/or necessary experience to supervisor, alienating staff and driving away good employees."

But can bad bosses – bosses who don't treat employees fairly, who bully, disrespect, and fail to support their employees – cause more trouble than staff retention problems? Yes. As a January 2002 article in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) put it succinctly: "Low organizational justice is a risk to the health of employees." Indeed, studies show that bad bosses can damage our hearts, increase our risk of mental health problems, make us stay home sick and, to a lesser extent, drive us to drink.

Heart Health

Researchers writing in the July 2003 issue of Occupational and Environmental Medicine (OEM) found that when female healthcare assistants in the UK worked with an "unfavourably perceived supervisor" it constituted a "potent workplace stressor, which might have a clinically significant impact on the employee's cardiovascular health." Similarly, a study in the March 1, 2005 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology, which followed 14,337 Belgian men for three years, found that the social support a person gets from supervisors and coworkers (i.e., does one have good supervisors and coworkers, or nightmare supervisors and backstabbing coworkers) can increase incidence of coronary events. And looking at data from the well-cited Whitehall II Study of civil servants in the UK, comes the finding published in the October 24, 2005 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine that people who are poorly treated by their boss – people who feel oppressed, deprived, and that they are being treated unjustly – have higher incidents of coronary heart disease than those who feel that they are being treated fairly.

Mental Health

Procedural justice is a form of organizational justice, which can be defined as fairness in the way decisions are made at work, with transparent decision-making, people being treated with respect and dignity, and with individuals' opinions being heard. A 2003 study of 1,786 female hospital employees concluded that working in an environment of low procedural justice seems to be an independent risk factor for psychiatric disorders. And looking at both sexes, a July 2006 article from OEM, using male and female Whitehall II Study participants, concluded: "… unfair treatment by supervisors increases risk of poor mental health." Also, a study of 167 men and women working in a variety of organizations, occupations, and industries in the USA, which was published in the July 2004 issue of Work & Stress showed that a boss's behavior largely predicts risk for depression and other psychiatric problems in the workplace. Similarly, a January 2006 paper in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research said "… bullied respondents had lower social support from coworkers and supervisors, and they reported more symptoms of somatisation, depression, anxiety, and negative affectivity than did the nonbullied respondents."

Sick Days

As everyone knows, not everyone who takes a sick day is actually sick. In the case of bad bosses, perhaps some bosses are literally making staff sick (as above), while some are making staff sick and tired, thus wanting (or needing) a respite. Two studies, both using Whitehall II data, support this. In one, published in the January 2006 issue of the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health (JECH), the authors wrote, "Adverse changes in the psychosocial work environment may lead to increased rates of sickness absence." In the other study, published in the June 2007 issue of the JECH, the authors state that unfairness in the workplace is not only an independent predictor of increased coronary events, but of "impaired health functioning." And the abovementioned January 2002 article in the AJPH found that the rates of absence due to sickness among those perceiving low justice in the workplace were 1.2 to 1.9 times higher than among those perceiving high justice in the workplace.

Also …

As mentioned, bad bosses may even drive some to drink! An early online article published on July 11, 2007 in OEM, reported that low procedural justice in the workplace is associated – albeit weakly – with an increased likelihood of heavy drinking. However, the good news is that an October 2000 study from the International Journal of Epidemiology that looked at workers in the Netherlands showed no connection between this sort of workplace stress and cancer!

What to Do?

Several of the studies concerning a boss's effect on employee health state that it is the employer's duty to institute interventions to improve working conditions that adversely affect employee health. One study of interventions employed to reduce adverse psychosocial work factors (e.g., poor social support and effort-reward imbalance) and mental health problems among healthcare workers in a hospital setting, published in the May 2006 issue of OEM showed that, after one year of intervention, several adverse psychosocial factors decreased, and there was a significant reduction in sleeping problems and work-related burnout in the experimental group.

But until organizational efforts occur, or until there is a change in management, employees have to take care of themselves:

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