Bonding with fellow employees will boost your health

Clipartix.com

A large Australian study has found that health in the workplace is strongly associated with how well we identify with the people or organization where we work, and in particularly the social groups we form there.

The benefits derive not just from the support of colleagues, but also because people find meaning and membership in social groups.

The meta-analysis was led by Dr. Niklas Steffens of the University of Queensland and covered 58 studies and more than 19,000 people across the globe. The results were published in Personality and Social Psychology Review by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

“This study is the first large-scale analysis showing that organizational identification is related to better health,” said Dr. Steffens.

The analysis found that socially identifying with ones fellow workers leads to both pysychological and physicological health, but the greatest benefits are psychological.

One surprising finding was “the more women there were in a sample, the weaker the identification-health relationship.” The researchers surmise this result might be related to the fact that “many workplaces have somewhat ‘masculine’ cultures.”

Among their recommendations are that the role of leadership should be examined, since other findings by the research program has show that leaders have a strong influence on the social identification-health connection.

To read the report in phys.org, click here.