Financial hardship has been shown to adversely affect the mental health of military personnel. Previous non-military studies have found that the relationship between financial hardship and mental health may be bidirectional, but this has not been established among military personnel. Further, we are unaware of any military studies that have examined potential moderators of these relationships. Using two waves of data collected 12 months apart (n = 2655 US soldiers), we examined the bidirectional relationship between financial hardship and mental health (depression and suicide risk) using cross-lagged panel models (CLPMs). Multigroup CLPMs were used to examine whether mental health service use and financial service use functioned as moderators. The interpretation of results was guided by the social selection and social drift hypotheses. Findings did not support a relationship between initial financial hardship and subsequent depression or suicide risk. However, both depression and suicide risk were significantly related to financial hardship over time. Moderation analyses revealed that whereas suicide risk was associated with more financial hardship among those non-users of mental health services, mental health service use did not moderate the relationship between depression and financial hardship. However, use of financial services was not found to moderate any of the relationships. Our findings lend support to the social drift hypothesis, but not the social causation hypothesis and suggest that the use of mental health services may buffer against financial hardship. More research using longer timeframes, more detailed measures of financial service use, and other mental health measures is needed to confirm our findings.

Economic stress remains perhaps the most widespread and impactful source of stress in workers’ lives across the globe. Although research has made a great deal of progress in understanding economic stressors, many theoretical and empirical gaps remain. This paper introduces a special issue of the Journal of Business and Psychology devoted to economic stress and work. Following an extensive review process, the special issue comprises 16 papers that make empirical and theoretical contributions to the economic stress literature. In this introduction, we set the stage for the importance of the special issue, discuss four broad themes that characterize the set of papers as a whole, and provide additional comments about future research challenges.

OBJECTIVE:Workplace violence and incivility threaten nurses' mental health, well-being, and organizational outcomes. This study examined how different sources of mistreatment - patients, coworkers, physicians, and managers - influence these outcomes over time. METHODS:A sample of 321 nurses completed surveys at two time points, nine months apart. Simple linear regression and relative weights analyses assessed the roles of patient violence and various sources of incivility on mental health, well-being, job search behavior, and affective organizational commitment. RESULTS:All forms of mistreatment negatively affected depression and life satisfaction. Patient violence and incivility had minimal impact on organizational outcomes, whereas incivility from coworkers, physicians, and managers more strongly predicted increased job search behavior and reduced organizational commitment. CONCLUSION:Targeting coworker and supervisor incivility through interventions and organizational policies may improve nurse outcomes, patient safety, and quality of care.

The opioid epidemic has plagued the United States for over two decades and continues to be a pervasive issue for workers and employers. While the factors contributing to opioid use are multifaceted, we drew from the job demands-resources model and the self-medication hypothesis to examine how the opioid epidemic intertwines with two co-existing issues: economic stress and the mental health crisis. Using a three-wave study of employed adults (N = 318), we examined depressive symptoms as a mediator of the subjective economic stressors (i.e., job insecurity, perceived income inadequacy) and opioid use (i.e., prescription opioids, illicit opioids) relationship. The findings supported depressive symptoms as an explanatory mechanism for the relationships of job insecurity and perceived income inadequacy with prescription opioid use but not illicit opioids. We also tested the bidirectional effects of opioid use on job insecurity and perceived income inadequacy, as mediated by depressive symptoms; however, these effects were not significant. Taken as a whole, our findings offer evidence supporting a relationship between subjective economic stress, mental health, and opioid use, with the specific pattern of effects differing based on the type of opioid use.

This study investigated the influence of economic stressors on the relationship between healthcare adherence attitudes and intentions. The data were collected through two time points, three months apart, from 442 US workers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Multiple regression analysis was used to test the model with perceived income inadequacy and job insecurity as moderators of the adherence attitudes-intentions relationship. The model controlled for adherence intentions at Time 1 (T1), medical illness history, and medical illness recency. The results confirmed the healthcare adherence attitudes-intentions relationship, and supported the hypothesis that economic stressors were negatively correlated with healthcare adherence attitudes and intentions. Job insecurity moderated this relationship and perceived income inadequacy was negatively associated with healthcare intentions across time. The findings highlight the importance of considering economic stress as a social determinant in interventions aimed at improving adherence. Research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying the relationship between economic stress and healthcare adherence.

Job insecurity is a pervasive and impactful global concern, eliciting stress and affecting the health and well-being of employees worldwide. The present study (N = 679) examined the relationship between job insecurity and health and well-being and the moderating role of economic dependence and job satisfaction. When workers depended on their job as a source of income or when they were highly satisfied with their work, the relationship between job insecurity and health and well-being was exacerbated. The findings shed light on the complexities of individual variability in the relationship between job insecurity and health and well-being.

Despite financial concerns representing of the most substantial sources of stress, the intersection between individual differences and financial stress has received sparce attention. Emphasizing the cognitive-appraisal process, our study reveals financial stress perceptions partly reflect a dispositional tendency to interpret financial information either more positively or negatively. Across two studies ( N = 441; N = 348), we found that positive and negative affect predict subjective financial perceptions of income adequacy. Further, using Relative Weights Analysis, we demonstrate that in predicting financial stress perceptions, dispositional affect is as important as, or more important than, objective measures of financial stress (i.e., household income and debt). Lastly, using moderated mediation, we found that both current and future perceived income adequacy mediate the relationship between one’s income and their experience of affective financial strain, and dispositional affect moderates this relationship. Our work informs current research and interventions seeking to understand individual differences in financial stress perceptions.

Childhood adversity stains the past of millions of working adults worldwide. The impact on health and well-being is substantial-a now-acknowledged public health crisis. Yet, research in the organizational sciences has failed to recognize the burden that individuals with this difficult history carry with them into the workforce. By synthesizing an interdisciplinary body of scholarship into a cohesive theoretical framework, we provide a foundation for emerging work in occupational health psychology. Empirically, across two single-level multiwave studies, we demonstrate the importance of adversity in one's childhood and its impact on the workplace specifically showing that child adversity, directly and indirectly, impacts worker attitudes and discretionary behaviors. Further, providing one of the few examinations of stress proliferation theory in the workplace, we demonstrate adulthood adversity as an essential mediating mechanism that leads to these work outcomes. From an applied perspective, our results highlight a need to focus on the healing and recovery of adult survivors as they work toward breaking the chains of the past in their lives and at work. In presenting this life course perspective on organizational attitudes and behaviors, our work offers a unique and vital contribution to occupational health theory, practice, and research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The purpose of this study is to examine the role of hardiness in the association between perceived income adequacy (PIA) and financial stress. Hardiness refers to an individual’s ability to find meaning and purpose in stressful events. We utilized a sample of 482 college students who completed questionnaires on hardiness, PIA, financial stress, and various objective financial measures. Relative weights analyses, bivariate correlations, and moderated regression indicated support for our hypotheses that PIA is negatively related to financial stress, hardiness is positively related to PIA, and hardiness moderates the PIA and financial stress relationship. Our study highlights the importance of the financial stress process and the role of hardiness. Future directions and practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Economic sources of stress are some of the most pervasive and significant in adults’ working lives. However, while the link between economic stress and health is well established, some forms of economic stress have received disproportionately less attention than they warrant in organizational psychology and organizational behavior scholarship. In this review, we identify five important domains of economic stress: financial stress, financial deprivation, unemployment, underemployment, and job insecurity. We review each area of literature, focusing on its antecedents, theoretical mechanisms, and consequences. We then highlight an emerging body of research that studies economic stress as a multilevel phenomenon and present a framework for economic stress interventions that discusses primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions at the individual, organizational, and community levels. We conclude by identifying several important directions for future economic stress research.

LAY SUMMARY Financial hardship, such as difficulty paying for expenses or having to borrow money from family and friends to pay for needs, is of concern for several reasons, including how it affects mental and physical health. The authors wanted to provide more detailed information on which aspects of health it affects and were also curious about whether positive financial behaviors affected the health of military personnel. This study found that service members who reported more financial hardship also reported higher levels of depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, insomnia, and physical aggression, poorer general health, and less sleep. However, positive financial behaviors had little effect on any of the health outcomes. Findings suggest that focusing on reducing financial hardship will be more effective in improving mental health than encouraging positive financial behaviors. This research has implications for the ongoing military efforts to improve financial literacy and reduce financial hardship.

Access to abortion care has a profound impact on women's ability to participate in the workforce. In the US, restrictions on abortion care have waxed and waned over the years, including periods when abortion was broadly permitted across the nation for most pregnant people for a substantial proportion of pregnancy and times when restrictions varied across states, including states where abortion is banned for nearly all reasons. Additionally, access to abortion care has always been a reproductive justice issue, with some people more able to access this care than others even when it is structurally available. In June 2022, the US Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, returning to states the ability to determine restrictions on abortion, including near-total bans on abortion. In this anthology, ten experts share their perspectives on what the Dobbs decision means for the future, how it will exacerbate existing, well-researched issues, and likely also create new challenges needing investigation. Some contributions are focused on research directions, some focus on implications for organizations, and most include both. All contributions share relevant occupational health literature and describe the effects of the Dobbs decision in context.

Social resource crafting is a job crafting strategy in which employees proactively increase their social resources (e.g., feedback from coworkers, coaching from supervisor). We examined social resource crafting's relationships with work-related social support (perceived supervisor and coworker support) and work engagement. Specifically, as there has been growing interest in understanding resource crafting and work engagement, we investigated the directionality of this relationship. Using a two-wave study and structural equation modelling, we tested the dual pathways between resource crafting and work engagement as well as resource crafting's relationship with each type of support. The results suggested social resource crafting was associated with higher levels of coworker support-but not supervisor support - over time and supported a unidirectional path from social resource crafting to work engagement. Our findings provide valuable insight into the power employees have to craft their own positive experiences at work.

Burnout among pastors poses a threat to local church health and ministry vitality. This study examined how pastor job burnout relates to measures of church organizational health. Specifically, the current study examined the relationships between pastor job burnout and (a) intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness of worship service attenders and (b) church organizational health: financial stability and pastor turnover intentions. These relationships were studied using data from the U.S. Congregational Life Survey (USCLS) collected during 2008 to 2009. Participants were sampled across Catholic and Protestant Christian denominations, and a small proportion of participants represented other religious traditions. Analyses indicated that pastor burnout was negatively related to two measures of attenders’ extrinsic religiousness: sense of belonging and participation, but not intrinsic religiousness. Churches with higher average pastor burnout had lower ratings of financial stability. Pastor burnout was positively related to pastor turnover intentions. Social support from the congregation weakened the relationship between pastor job burnout and turnover intentions. The current study can be used to inform church leaders, members, and denominational boards. These findings demonstrate that efforts to prevent and reduce pastor burnout would benefit the entire church organization.

OBJECTIVE:The objective of this research was to assess the relative contribution of three resilience-related dispositional resources (trait mindfulness, core self-evaluations, and optimism) to emergency medicine physicians' fatigue, retention, and productivity.METHODS:We surveyed emergency physicians employed by a national (US) medical staffing organization. The survey included measures of work stressors, resilience resources, job search behavior, and fatigue. We linked the survey responses to objective demographic and productivity measures from the organization's records.RESULTS:A total of 371 respondents completed the survey. Multiple regression analyses demonstrated support for each of the three resilience-related resources as predictors. Relative weights analyses showed that resilience accounted for 14% and 62% of the outcome variance, whereas work demands accounted for between 32% and 56%.CONCLUSIONS:Multiple facets of dispositional resilience are important predictors of emergency medicine physicians' occupational health, retention, and productivity.

Workaholism is increasingly recognized as a potential threat to occupational health. Although most research has conceptualized workaholism as a trait, some research suggests that it may also fluctuate from day to day. Moreover, the effects of the dynamic properties of workaholism on work and family outcomes may be contingent on one's economic situation. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to test the interactive effect of workday workaholism and economic resources on nightly work-family conflict and family engagement. Using experience sampling methodology, we demonstrated that workaholism fluctuates from one day to the next and has detrimental short-term effects on work-family conflict. Additionally, our findings indicated that the interaction between workday workaholism and perceived income adequacy predicted both nighty work-family conflict and family engagement. While the association between workday workaholism and work-family conflict was stronger for those who experienced low income adequacy, the relationship between workaholism and family engagement was stronger for those who exhibited high income adequacy. Similarly, job security buffered the effect of workaholism on work-family conflict. We discuss the theoretical and practice implications of this study as well as recommend future research directions.