A new study revealed that being emotionally attached to your work contributes to an overall improved and healthy well-being.
As efforts to emphasize the importance of affective organizational commitment (AOC) increase, the rate of employee turnover may even decrease, researchers said. AOC is a concept described as an employee's emotional attachment to, identification with, and involvement in an organization.
In a study issued in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, Thomas Clausen of the Danish National Research Centre for the Working Environment, Copenhagen and his colleagues looked at how the AOC affected the health and mental well-being of more than 5,000 Danish eldercare workers divided into 300 workgroups.
Researchers found that workgroups with higher AOC had employees whose psychological well-being was also high. The higher AOC rate also led to fewer rates of sleep disturbances and lower rates of absences due to sickness.
Somehow, the relationship between group-level AOC and group-level psychological well-being were directly proportional. Researchers say that these two factors can be explained by individual-level AOC, but the health aspect which includes sickness rates, absences and sleep deprivation are separate from the group-level AOC.
Previous research has shown that employees' AOC greatly affected their motivation and factors such as absenteeism. The study said that group-level AOC was indeed vital in predicting the well-being of employees in different organizations.
The higher rate of group-level AOC would act as an "emotional contagion" and would pull its members together, the study explained.
Researchers suggested that healthcare and eldercare services, as well as other organizations, should create strategies that aimed at improving AOC. The effort might help address the high rates of employee turnover and burnout.
According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were more than 4.8 million cases of employee turnover during August this year, and the separation rates were 3.8 percent.
Meanwhile, work-related stress also contributes to low levels of individual AOC. A previous study showed that stress experienced in the workplace could lead to health outcomes as dangerous as the effects of secondhand smoke.
"When you think about how much time individuals typically spend at work, it's not that surprising," said Joel Goh, a researcher from the Harvard Business School.
In the end, researchers hope that companies develop and redesign strategies that could eradicate work-related stress.
