Poor Team Spirit In The Workplace Boosts Risk Of Depression

Main Category: Depression
Also Included In: Psychology / Psychiatry
Article Date: 12 Apr 2009 - 0:00 PDT

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Poor team spirit in the workplace boosts an employee's risk of depression, and subsequent use of antidepressants, finds research published ahead of print in Occupational and Environmental Medicine. The findings are based on a nationally representative sample of 3,347 Finnish employees, all of whom were aged between 30 and 64.

Each employee was quizzed about their perceptions of the working environment, including team spirit, the quality of communication, and their degree of job control/demands.

They were asked to rate their working environment according to four descriptions of the atmosphere in the workplace: encouraging and supportive of new ideas; prejudiced and conservative; nice and easy; or quarrelsome and disagreeable.

They were also asked about their social lives, living arrangements, and access to health services.

Their diagnoses of depression, anxiety, and alcohol misuse were then assessed, and information on prescriptions for antidepressants over the following three years was collected from a national register.

Poor team spirit, epitomised by the perception that the working environment was prejudiced or quarrelsome, was not associated with alcohol misuse or anxiety, after taking account of the degree of individual job control/demands.

But employees who felt that team spirit in the workplace was poor were over 60% more likely to report depressive symptoms and they were over 50% more likely to be taking antidepressants.

Depression and anxiety are common disorders in the working population, say the authors, and account for a considerable amount of sick leave and incapacity for work.

They also point out that while the prevalence of mental health problems has not increased in recent years in Finland, there has been an explosion in the use of antidepressant drugs, with a sevenfold increase in prescriptions in Finland between 1990 and 2005.

"More attention should be paid to psychosocial factors at work," they urge.

"The association between team climate at work and mental health in the Finnish Health 2000 Study."
Online First Occup Environ Med 2009; doi 10.1136/oem.2008.043299