Fostering a Supportive Environment at Work - University of California ...

The Psychologist-Manager Journal, 11: 265?283, 2008 Copyright ? The Society of Psychologists in Management ISSN 1088-7156 print / 1550-3461 online DOI: 10.1080/10887150802371823

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H1T05hP85eM80P-J73sy14c56h61ologist-Manager Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2, August 2008: pp. 1?33

Fostering a Supportive Environment At Work

FToasytleorring a Supportive Environment

Shelley E. Taylor

University of California, Los Angeles

Supportive social contacts at work affect job satisfaction and protect against jobinduced psychological distress and health risks. Accordingly, interventions to create and improve oppurtunities for supportive social contact are a high priority. Guidelines for the development of such interventions and to whom they should be targeted are described.

What does it mean to foster a supportive work environment? Organizations have struggled with this issue for decades. On the one hand, making the work environment a place that encourages commitment is an important goal, and yet pressures toward cost containment and maximizing productivity can impose some limits on the kinds of interventions that might be undertaken.

In this article, I'll discuss what constitutes a supportive work environment generally, focusing especially on social support at work. Social support is the perception or experience that one is cared about by others, esteemed and valued, and is part of a social network of mutual assistance and obligations (Wills, 1991; Taylor, 2007). Social support can be emotional, instrumental (or practical), and informational, and in the workplace it occurs through social interactions with coworkers and supervisors (House, 1981).

Why should organizations care about social support? Why should they be committed to improving the social environment in the workplace? On the one hand, it's a good thing to do, but it's easy to think of reasons why one might not want to foster social relations any more than is already the case. People who spend their time at work connecting with friends are, virtually by definition, not doing their work. Yet, modest efforts to improve opportunities for social support

Correspondence should be sent to Shelley E. Taylor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 1285 Franz Hall, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563. E-mail: taylors@ psych.ucla.edu

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at work clearly offset any such concerns, as I will show. Moreover, when workers perceive that the work environment is socially supportive, they report that the organization is supportive more generally. The reverse is also true: workers who say they feel supported at work report that their work environment is more socially supportive as well. And, fostering a supportive environment may be less complex and costly than might first appear.

BENEFITS OF A SUPPORTIVE ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENT

There are a lot of reasons for fostering a supportive work environment. First, and perhaps most obvious, is that workers who feel supported come to work (House, 1981). People who enjoy the work environment, who have at least one friend, preferably several, at work, like their jobs, and thus absenteeism is lower and job satisfaction ratings are higher. Workers' ability to form supportive relationships at work is one of the strongest characteristics of highly productive work places (Gummer, 2001). From an organizational standpoint, this translates not only to a more committed workforce, but into revenue that is not lost to absenteeism and interruptions in work flow.

Workers who experience a supportive environment at work are less likely to make use of costly mental health services (Buunk et al., 1993; Loscocco & Spitze, 1990). Social support at work helps guard against depression and anxiety, which are some of the most common reasons for using mental health services. The effects of social support on mental health complaints may be particularly important for women workers. Women are known to depend on other people for help with managing the stressors in their lives more than men do (e.g., Tamres, Janicki, & Helgeson, 2002), and so women who have an opportunity to develop social relationships at work have an outlet for coping with problems that might otherwise lead to psychological distress.

Social support contributes to physical health and may thereby reduce health care costs. A socially supportive environment has been tied to many specific health benefits. Women with social support at work experience fewer complications during pregnancy and childbirth (Collins et al., 1993). People who report more social contacts are less susceptible to herpes attacks if they have been diagnosed with herpes (VanderPlate, Aral, & Magder, 1988). People who feel supported in their environments are less likely to experience a heart attack and are less likely to experience a repeat heart attack if they have had one (see Taylor, 2008, for a review). People who have social support recover faster from surgeries of various kinds, including coronary artery disease surgery (King et al., 1993; Kulik & Mahler, 1993). People who feel socially supported have better diabetes control (Marteau, Bloch, & Baum, 1987) and if they have been diagnosed with arthritis, report that it is less painful (DeVellis et al., 1986).

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Social support also reduces the risk of early mortality. One community study (Berkman & Syme, 1979), for example, followed nearly 7,000 residents over a nine-year period to identify what factors contribute to long life. They found that people who lacked social and community ties were more likely to die of all causes during the follow-up period, compared to those who cultivated or maintained social relationships. In fact, having social contacts predicted 2.8 years increased life expectancy among women and 2.3 years among men. These differences were not explained by disparities in health at the beginning of the study or by health habits.

Indeed, social isolation is one of the major risk factors for early death in both animal and human studies (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988). People who say that they are lonely, and thus experience a sense of subjective social isolation, are more likely to become ill with a broad array of diseases and are more likely to die early compared to those with social support (Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2007).

The effect of social support on health is as powerful or more powerful than wellestablished medical predictors of chronic disease and death. For example, social support is more important than blood pressure, lipids, obesity, and physical activity in predicting cardiovascular-related health outcomes, and it is on a par in magnitude with smoking (in the positive direction) (House, Landis, & Umberson, 1988).

WHY IS SOCIAL SUPPORT BENEFICIAL FOR HEALTH?

Why does social support have such strong effects on health? There are several reasons. These benefits occur in part because social relationships help people stave off illness altogether. This might surprise you because so many illnesses have a contagion element. You might imagine that people who have more social relationships would be exposed to a larger germ pool. However, the effects of social support appear to offset whatever increased exposure risk might occur.

Sheldon Cohen and his associates (Cohen et al., 1997), for example, have done some fascinating, if diabolical, studies that demonstrate the importance of social support. They recruited people for a study of colds and flus and intentionally infected them by swabbing the inside of their nasal passages with virussoaked cotton swabs. They found, as expected, that people who were under a lot of stress were more likely to develop infections than people under less stress, and the colds and flus they developed were more serious as well. However, the people who had more social ties and reported having more social support in their lives were less likely to become ill following exposure to the virus, and, if they did, they recovered more quickly than those with fewer ties.

Another route by which social support improves health and thereby may lower health care costs is through better health habits (Taylor, 2007). It's easy, of course, to imagine ways in which social support could foster poor health habits; for example,

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people who go to bars after work and drink together or smoke together aren't doing anything beneficial for their health. But often times, people will play sports together or simply hang out, activities that are inherently stress reducing. Moreover, among the things they talk about are health habits, such as diet. Small groups often bring pressure on those within their group to lose weight, stop smoking, or change a diet in a healthy direction. Indeed, smoking and alcohol abuse are more likely to be problems for the socially isolated than the socially connected (Broman, 1993). Particularly, when one creates a work environment in which not smoking, weight loss, exercise, and other health-conscious habits are part of the organizational culture, then the social support network can reinforce those cultural values and increase the likelihood that a worker will change problematic health behaviors. For example, women for whom exercise has been prescribed for medical problems are less likely to fall off in their practice if they experience social support in a group exercise program (Fraser & Spink, 2002).

This point reflects a larger one, namely, that when work groups or informal groups adopt the norms of the organization's culture, it can reinforce mental and physical health-related outcomes. For example, research has found that absenteeism is heavily influenced by work group beliefs about whether it is okay or not to be absent from work (Geurts, Schaufeli, & Buunk, 1995). In short, a socially supportive environment can underscore other aspects of an organizational culture in ways that may improve workers' mental and physical health and reduce the costs associated with mental and physical health disorders.

BIOLOGICAL PATHWAYS FROM SOCIAL SUPPORT TO HEALTH

Other reasons why social support affects health so strongly are because of its biological impact. It is not my intention to cite a lot of biology, but sometimes findings such as those just noted can be regarded as a bit "magical," and so I want you to see that there are credible, well established biological pathways by which social support has beneficial effects on health. I'm going to start with the most important pathway that concerns the direct effects on biological stress regulatory systems.

When people are under stress, their bodies release epinephrine and norepinephrine which result in sympathetic nervous system arousal. This experience is all too familiar and can involve the feeling of your heart racing, breathlessness, sweating, shaking, and other symptoms that people experience when they are under intense stress. Stress also engages the hypothalamic pituitary adrenocortical (HPA) axis, which involves the release of corticosteroids, including cortisol.

The activation of these systems under stress is important because they mobilize people for direct action against threats. During early human prehistory,

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most of the stressors that we encountered were threats that demanded instantaneous responses, such as skirmishes with other tribes, the attack of a predator, the need to bring down game for food, and natural disasters. A very rapid, intense stress response is beneficial for coping with such threats, because it mobilizes a person for action quickly and shunts biological resources to the areas where they are most needed, for example, permitting enhanced respiration, more rapid flow of blood to the extremities, and other changes beneficial for combating stressors.

The dilemma in our current lives is that most of our stressors do not have these features (McEwen & Lasley, 2002). We don't need to take down big game anymore. No one encounters a saber-toothed tiger on the way to work, and although we may be ambushed by coworkers, rarely does that assume the physical form that it did during early human prehistory. Instead, our stressors are work overload, deadlines, role conflicts, role ambiguity, and other more sedentary, but nonetheless. often intensely stressful experiences.

Despite the fact that our stressors have changed, our biological stress responses have not. The body continues to be mobilized by the sympathetic nervous system and the HPA axis in ways that are designed to combat intensely physical stressors. Particularly under conditions of chronic stress, such as long commutes, unsatisfying personal relationships, or grinding strain at work, stress systems may be chronically engaged, and over time the risks to health are substantial. Health psychologists, neuroscientists, and medical researchers have documented the increased risk that chronic stress exerts on such prevalent disorders as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, infectious disorders, and some cancers (McEwen & Lasley, 2002). Chronic stress also aggravates immune-related disorders, such as allergies, autoimmune disease, and rheumatoid arthritis, and it consistently confers and aggravates risk for cardiovascular disorders, such as hypertension.

Why is a supportive environment helpful in combating these adverse effects of stress? First, people are less likely to appraise potentially stressful events as threatening if they are in a supportive environment. Rather, they are more likely to interpret events as challenging and can then muster the resources to address the stress. It is easy to envision this in your own life. Often, challenges that seem insurmountable when you're trying to accomplish them alone can seem much easier to manage following a word of encouragement and advice. Under circumstances in which people experience social support, most challenges seem more tractable than they may seem when accomplished in a socially stressful environment. So, part of the benefits of social support operate at the appraisal level, namely that people are less likely to appraise events as stressful.

A second way in which a socially supportive environment affects stress responses is by keeping biological stress responses low. Not all stressors can be beneficially appraised even in a socially supportive environment. Things happen

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