Individual and contextual influences of workplace social capital on health – findings from the BELSTRESS study

Introduction. This study examined the individual and contextual influences of instrumental and emotional workplace social capital on health. In line with the “social cohesion” school, workplace social capital was conceptualized as the resources available to members of the same workplace. Different forms of social capital such as instrumental or emotional support can relate to the horizontal dimension concerning coworkers and the vertical dimension concerning supervisors. Few studies have addressed these different dimensions simultaneously. Methods. Results are based on pooled data from the BELSTRESS I and III studies comprising 24.402 workers (73% men) from 32 workplaces. Instrumental (being helpful for doing your job) and emotional (showing interest or listening) workplace social capital from coworkers and supervisors were assessed with single items from the Job Content Questionnaire. Physical health complaints were assessed by the Current Health Index and depressive symptoms by the CES-D scale. The individual workplace social capital scores were aggregated as mean values at the workplace level. Multilevel linear regression analyses were conducted in MLwiN.  Results. The proportion of variance in health outcome variables explained by the workplace contextual level was 6% for physical health and 8% for depressive symptoms. After adjusting for gender, age and education, individual perceptions of instrumental and emotional workplace social capital from coworkers and supervisors were all negatively related to physical health complaints and depressive symptoms. When the workplace contextual levels of social capital were additionally entered in the models, the workplace level of instrumental coworker social capital had a significant favorable contextual effect on physical and mental health. A significant cross-level interaction was observed with job type: the association was more pronounced for blue-collar workers compared to executives.  

Conclusions. Both individual and contextual influences of workplace social capital on mental and physical health were observed in a large sample of middle-aged men and women.