CHAPTER 4: Spiritual Factors in Occupational Health and Well-Being: Opportunities for Research Translation

Can spiritual and religious factors play a role in promoting occupational health and well-being? Emerging research in psychology, management, and other fields strongly supports this possibility. Here, we review relevant theoretical and empirical work, clarifying inter-relations of three topics of critical social importance: work, health, and spirituality/religion.

Promoting workers’ health involves not only the workers and their families, but also their organizations and the larger society. Healthy workers are a primary foundation of an organization’s ability to effectively pursue its mission. Not surprisingly, occupational health has become an important field of research and professional practice (e.g., Reese, 2009). Early work in this field emphasized reducing workplace environment risks such as hazardous chemicals and dangerous machinery. In recent decades, mitigating unhealthy psychological factors, such as chronic work-induced mental stress, has become a focus, giving rise to the well-established field of occupational health psychology (e.g., Quick & Tetrick, 2003).