Abstract
BackgroundPsychosocial stressors in the workplace can be detrimental to mental health. Conflicts at work, e.g. aggression, hostility or threats from coworkers, supervisors or customers, can be considered a psychosocial stressor, possibly increasing risk for depressive symptoms. Existing studies, however, differ in the assessment of social conflicts, i.e. as individual- or job-level characteristics. Here, we investigated the association between conflicts at work assessed as objective job characteristics, and depressive symptomatology, using data from a large population-based sample. Additionally, we investigated gender differences and the impact of personality traits and social resources.MethodsWe used data from the population-based LIFE-Adult-Study from Leipzig, Germany. Information on conflicts at work, assessed as job characteristics, were drawn from the Occupational Information Network, depressive symptoms were assessed via the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale. Multilevel linear regression models with individuals and occupations as levels of analysis were applied to investigate the association between conflicts at work and depressive symptoms.ResultsOur sample included 2164 employed adults (age: 18–65 years, mean: 49.3, SD: 7.9) in 65 occupations. No association between conflicts s at work and depressive symptomatology was found (men: b = − 0.14; p = 0.74, women: b = 0.17, p = 0.72). Risk for depression was mostly explained by individual-level factors like e.g. neuroticism or level of social resources. The model showed slightly higher explanatory power in the female subsample.ConclusionConflicts at work, assessed as objective job characteristics, were not associated with depressive symptoms. Possible links between interpersonal conflict and impaired mental health might rather be explained by subjective perceptions of social stressors and individual coping styles.
Highlights
Psychosocial stressors in the workplace can be detrimental to mental health
As in many comparable studies investigating the link between certain job aspects and mental health using individual- and job-level information, the association is not significant and job-level factors account for only little variance in depressive symptomatology
Our findings suggest that the association of interpersonal conflict at work and depressive symptoms does not differ between occupations
Summary
Psychosocial stressors in the workplace can be detrimental to mental health. Conflicts at work, e.g. aggression, hostility or threats from coworkers, supervisors or customers, can be considered a psychosocial stressor, possibly increasing risk for depressive symptoms. While the demand-control-(support) model provides a highly valuable measure for important aspects of work organization, it has been argued that other psychosocial aspects of the working environment are still understudied [6, 12,13,14,15] This applies to social conflicts at work and their possible association with mental health [16, 17]. The original article introducing the demand-control-model explicitly named social conflicts at work as a stressor, stating that job demands include “psychological stressors involved in accomplishing the workload, stressors relating to unexpected tasks, and stressors of job-related personal conflict” [8] Against this background, social conflicts can be considered a stressful work demand, increasing risk of depression
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