Assessment of the psychosocial work environment of professional drivers

Abstract

Along with globalization in recent periods, psychosocial risks at the workplace have been classified as considerable developing risks for human mental and physical health. These risks exist both in developed and developing countries. The current study aims to assess the psychosocial work environment of professional drivers in a multidimensional concept. The study population consisted of 645 Iranian professional drivers. Psychosocial factors were examined in five domains including job demand, job content, interpersonal relationship, work–individual interface and general and mental health through the validated Persian medium-size version of the Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire (COPSOQ). Among 26 psychosocial scales, sensory demands (91.3) and cognitive demands (70.3) got the highest average scores in professional drivers. Logistic regression was applied to evaluate the association between psychosocial work environment indexes and self reported health and well being of drivers. This study showed that poor psychosocial work environment in job demand, job content, work–individual interface as well as having a car accident history was associated with unfavorable health outcomes for the participants, after adjustment for age, marital status, education level, vehicle type and smoking. It is worth focusing on drivers’ working schedule and their psychosocial work environment.