Discrimination and Well-being in Mental Health Institutions
Based on a study of mental health workers, Wood and his colleagues investigate the effects of discrimination from four sources, managers, coworkers, patients, and visitors in order to assess:
a) whether strength of the impacts will depend on the relative power of the perpetrator, and
b) the negative impact of discrimination is explained by its effects on people’s sense of organizational justice.
Using survey data from 1733 UK mental health workers, the results of a structural equation model support an explanation of the effect of discrimination on well-being in terms of organizational justice perceptions for discrimination from managers and from visitors, but less so for discrimination from co-workers or from patients. Wood et al.’s findings highlight the importance of differentiating amongst distinct sources of discrimination at work and the salience of organizational justice perceptions in explaining the effects of discrimination from some sources.
The data collection for this project was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Service Delivery and Organisation Programme (project number /08/1604/142).
Discrimination and Well-being in Organizations: Testing the Differential Power and Organizational Justice Theories of Workplace Aggression by S. Wood, J Braeken, and K. Niven will appear in Journal of Business Ethics later this year.
