Resource Utilization Model: Organizational Leaders as Resource Facilitators

Employee mental health problems are among the most costly issues facing employers in the developed world. Recognizing this, many employers have introduced resources designed to help employees cope with stressors. Yet, most employees fail-to-use these resources, even when they need them and could benefit from using them. We seek to understand this resource underutilization by (a) drawing on and expanding resource theories to explain why employees do not use existing resources and (b) proposing that leaders, managers, and supervisors can play a key role in facilitating the utilization of available resources. In doing so, we introduce resource utilization theory (RUT) as a complementary perspective to conservation of resources (COR) theory. We propose that RUT may provide the framework to describe patterns of resource utilization among employees, and to explain why employees do not use available resources to deal with existing stressors and demands.