Georg F Bauer

• MD DrPH
• Head of Department at University of Zurich

We examined the association between changes in employee job and off-job crafting and their self-rated health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we investigated how these associations differed across sample subgroups, contrasting differences in work location, living situation, and contractual changes (short-time work). We used four waves of a lo...

The aim of this study was to investigate long‐term development in job crafting during the COVID‐19 pandemic among employees with and without mental health issues (MHI). Furthermore, this study aimed to explore the role of job resources regarding these changes. We have analysed longitudinal panel data of six waves between 2019 (applied as pre‐pandem...

Background Work-related sense of coherence (Work-SoC) is defined as the perceived comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness of an individual’s work situation. The purpose of this study was to investigate the factor structure, invariance, reliability, and validity of the Polish version of the Work-SoC Scale. Method The research was carrie...

Introduction An intensified and increasingly demanding and digitalized working life, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, requires new approaches to improve health and wellbeing at work and beyond. This presentation provides an overview of 5-years research progress on needs-based crafting. The Identity-based Integrative Needs Model of Crafting pro...

Background Sense of coherence (SOC) is a personal resource that reflects the extent to which one perceives the world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. Decades of empirical research consistently show that SOC is an important protective resource for health and well-being. Despite the extensive use of the 13-item measure of SOC, there rem...

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the boundaries between the work and nonwork domain have rapidly blurred, presenting employees with new challenges and potentially heightening interference of the work with the nonwork domain (work-home interference, WHI) and vice versa (home-work interference, HWI). To counteract these interferences, employees...

Crafting research has often focused solely on the work domain or examined work and non‐work life domains separately, using a variable‐centered approach. Little is known about the interactions of crafting processes in the work and non‐work domain. In this time‐lagged study, we examined (1) the relationship between job and off‐job crafting behaviours...

Background Self-initiated and proactive changes in working conditions through crafting are essential for shaping work and improving work-related well-being. Recently, the research stream of job crafting has been extended to other life domains. The present paper aims to study a novel crafting concept—work–nonwork balance crafting—investigating the r...

BACKGROUND: The high prevalence of mental health issues (MHIs) among employees poses challenges for society. However, there is a lack of knowledge concerning the factors that influence their ability to stay, maintain productivity, and potentially thrive at work.OBJECTIVE: The aim of the study was to investigate individual (sense of coherence (SOC),...

The aim of this study was to investigate long-term development in job crafting during the COVID-19 pandemic among employees with and without mental health issues (MHIs). Furthermore, this study aimed to explore the role of job resources regarding these changes. We have analyzed longitudinal panel data of six waves between 2019 (applied as pre-pande...

We present the conceptualization and validation of the Needs-Based Job Crafting Scale (NJCS), a new assessment tool theoretically grounded in the Identity-Based Integrative Needs Model of Crafting and DRAMMA psychological needs (detachment, relaxation, autonomy, mastery, meaning, and affiliation). The article is composed of three studies. In Study...

The measurement of sense of coherence (SOC) has received attention for more than three decades. Despite the extensive use of SOC-13, there is still a long debate regarding its dimensionality structure. Recently, there has been an increasing use of network modeling as a valid alternative to latent-variable modeling. This study proposes an explorator...

Background: Evidence on the impact of post COVID-19 condition (PCC) on work ability is limited but critical due to its high prevalence among working-age individuals. This study aimed to evaluate the association between PCC, work ability, and occupational changes in a population-based cohort. Methods: We used data from working-age adults included...

Humans are making use of digital technologies to profoundly transform their working tasks and systems. Psychologists who design interventions to improve health and well-being at the workplace can follow two approaches regarding this transformation: (a) they will make targeted use of the emerging digital technologies themselves and design what we la...

Background: Evidence from population-based studies on the impact of post COVID-19 condition (PCC) on ability to work is limited but critical due to its high prevalence among individuals of working-age. Objective: To evaluate the association between PCC, work ability, and occupational changes. Design: Population-based, longitudinal cohort. Setting:...

Our study examines the psychometric properties of the short version of the Sense of Coherence scale (SOC-13) in a representative sample of the Czech adults ( N = 498). In the introduction, we describe the general characteristics of the scale summarizing existing evidence about its psychometric properties in other populations and provide a brief ove...

Our study examines the core concept of salutogenesis—sense of coherence (SOC)—in relation to off-job crafting (OJC) and mental well-being (MWB). The original salutogenic model of health mainly addresses the protective function of SOC against adversity. In our study, we focus on the recently proposed path of positive health development that captures...

Shaping off-job life is becoming increasingly important for workers to increase and maintain their optimal functioning (i.e., feeling and performing well). Proactively shaping the job domain (referred to as job crafting) has been extensively studied, but crafting in the off-job domain has received markedly less research attention. Based on the Inte...

Ongoing developments, such as digitalization, increased the interference of the work and nonwork life domains, urging many to continuously manage engagement in respective domains. The COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent home-office regulations further boosted the need for employees to find a good work-nonwork balance, thereby optimizing their health a...

While implementing participation in an organisational health intervention (OHI), the formation of a group of representatives responsible for developing and realising action plans is a common approach. This mixed-methods study aimed (a) to examine differential intervention effects for employees who are directly involved in intervention decision maki...

BACKGROUND Workplace health interventions can produce beneficial health- and business-related outcomes. However, such interventions have traditionally focused on lifestyle behaviors of individuals, mostly not considering the role of working conditions. The wecoach intervention is an internet-based tool that combines both a digital and a participato...

Background Burnout is a major societal issue adversely affecting employees’ health and performance, which over time results in high sick leave costs for organizations. Traditional rehabilitation therapies show suboptimal effects on reducing burnout and the return-to-work process. Based on the health-promoting effects of nature, taking clients outdo...

The COVID-19 pandemic and remote working challenge employees' possibilities to recover from work during their off-job time. We examined the relationship between off-job crafting and burnout across the COVID-19 crisis. We used a longitudinal research design, comprising one wave collected before the onset of the pandemic, in March 2019 (T1), and one...

The COVID-19 pandemic induced considerable changes regarding our working and private lives. This study aimed to examine the psychosocial effects of the COVID-19 crisis on German and Swiss employees. We analyzed the impact of the crisis on working and private life, well-being and health indicators. We tried to understand how the salutogenic behavior...

Background: Workplace health interventions can produce beneficial health- and business-related outcomes. However, such interventions have traditionally focused on lifestyle behaviors of individuals, mostly not considering the role of working conditions. The wecoach intervention is an internet-based tool that combines both a digital and a participa...

BACKGROUND Workplace health interventions can produce beneficial health- and business-related outcomes. However, such interventions have traditionally focused on lifestyle behaviors of individuals, mostly not considering the role of working conditions. The wecoach intervention is an internet-based tool that combines both a digital and a participato...

Settings are defined by the World Health Organization (1998) as “the place or social context in which people engage in daily activities in which environmental, organizational, and personal factors interact to affect health and well-being.” Such settings range from small-scale home/family to (international) organizations and large cities and thus di...

This open access book is a thorough update and expansion of the 2017 edition of The Handbook of Salutogenesis, responding to the rapidly growing salutogenesis research and application arena. Revised and updated from the first edition are background and historical chapters that trace the development of the salutogenic model of health and flesh out...

In this chapter, the authors convey some of the main ways the term ‘salutogenesis’ is used today. Antonovsky introduced the term salutogenesis in his 1979 and 1987 books on the Salutogenic Model of Health, but salutogenesis subsequently has come to refer to a core concept in the model in particular; the sense of coherence. This usage has advanced t...

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the universal chaos created by it, this study explores the role of sense of coherence (Soc, Antonovsky, 1979) and how it enables coping with a stressful situation and staying well. SOC is a generalized orientation which allows one to perceive the world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. In an at...

Background Research shows that leaders influence the health and well-being of employees, by being either a buffer or major source of employee’s work stressors. Various leadership behaviors and their relation to employee outcomes have been examined. Yet, a satisfactory explanation of how leaders’ behavior influences health has not been found. A new...

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and the universal chaos created by it, this study explores the role of sense of coherence (Soc, Antonovsky, 1979) and how it enables coping with a stressful situation and staying well. SOC is a generalized orientation which allows one to perceive the world as comprehensible, manageable, and meaningful. In an at...

Background The COVID-19 crisis has radically changed the way people live and work. While most studies have focused on prevailing negative consequences, potential positive shifts in everyday life have received less attention. Thus, we examined the actual and perceived overall impact of the COVID-19 crisis on work and private life, and the consequenc...

Background: Work stress affects individual health and well-being. These negative effects could be mitigated through regular monitoring of employees’ stress. Such monitoring becomes even more important as the digital transformation of the economy implies profound changes in working conditions. Objective: The goal of this study was to investigate the...

Considering the Job Demands‐Resources (JD‐R) model, this study investigated the relation between job demands, job resources and turnover intention among persons with multiple sclerosis (pwMS) as an example of chronic disease. We hypothesized that job demands and job resources are related to turnover intention, as mediated by work engagement, burnou...

Background: Research shows that leaders influence the health and well-being of employees, by being either a buffer or major source of employee's work stressors. Various leadership behaviors and their relation to employee outcomes have been examined. Yet, a satisfactory explanation of how leaders’ behavior influences health has not been found. A new...

Background: Work stress afflicts individual health and well-being. These negative effects could be mitigated through regular monitoring of employees’ stress. Such monitoring becomes even more important as the digital transformation of the economy implies profound changes of working conditions. Objective: To investigate whether the computer mouse ca...

Background: The COVID-19 crisis has radically changed the way people live and work. While most studies have focused on prevailing negative consequences, potential positive shifts in everyday life have received less attention. Thus, we examined the actual and perceived overall impact of the COVID-19 crisis on work and private life, and the consequen...

The “wecoach” is a web-application that builds the capacities of team leaders to improve working conditions that are positively related to the psychological health and well-being of their team members. The web-application works through an automated, rule-based chat enhanced by machine learning. This so-called conversational agent guides the team le...

Background Multiple sclerosis (MS) notably affects adults of working age. For persons with MS (PwMS), being employed enhances their quality of life and it may be regarded as an indicator of overall functioning. Thus, ensuring work participation in PwMS is of general public health interest.Objective To examine relevant socio-demographic, MS-, health...

Background: The aim of this study is to examine the factors predicting the acceptance of a digitally-supported leadership and team development tool among nurse managers in three German-speaking countries. Objective: The tool supports leaders in conducting a participatory intervention that is aimed at enhancing wellbeing and motivation of staff by i...

This study presents the development of a generic workshop appraisal scale (WASC) for the evaluation of organizational health interventions. Based on the session evaluation questionnaire (SEQ) by Stiles (1980), we developed a short, generic 10-item scale with pairs of adjectives, covering five facets: comprehensibility, relevance, novelty, activatio...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study is to examine the factors predicting the acceptance of a digitally-supported leadership and team development tool among nurse managers in three German-speaking countries. OBJECTIVE The tool supports leaders in conducting a participatory intervention that is aimed at enhancing wellbeing and motivation of staff by id...

The aim of our review is to identify the key job resources and demands of nursing staff by integrating findings from previously published reviews along the lines of the JD-R model. Understanding these is highly relevant given the ever-increasing pressure in nursing work and the challenges of healthcare organizations in recruiting qualified staff. I...

More and more hospitals are introducing Lean approaches to counteract economic pressure and to increase their efficiency. Previous research shows that introducing Lean brings certain economic benefits for hospitals. However, studies also indicate a negative impact on employee well-being. In the project described in this chapter, we followed an inno...

Objectives: Practitioners and organizational leaders are calling for practical ways to explain and monitor factors that affect workplace health and productivity. This article builds on the well-established Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model and proposes an empirically tested ratio that aggregates indicators of job resources and demands. In this st...

The availability and development of social and personal resources are substantial components of a positive work experience. This study aims to inquire the reciprocal relations between the personal resource of psychological capital (PsyCap; hope, self-efficacy, resilience, and optimism) and the social job resource of social support, as proposed in t...

Sense of coherence (SoC) has been identified as an important health resource and is associated with various health-related outcomes, especially perceived health and mental health. SoC has also been found to be relevant in the work context. Our study examined whether job resources, such as autonomy or social support, can contribute to the developmen...

The relevance of interprofessional collaboration (IPC) is widely acknowledged. Given the lack of a fully validated instrument in the German language for measuring the level of IPC, we built upon the current, albeit psychometrically weak, German-language version of the instrument to devise a new version with improved wording and for subsequent psych...

Aaron Antonovsky advanced the concept of salutogenesis almost four decades ago (Antonovsky, Health, Stress and Coping. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1979; Unravelling the Mystery of Health. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA, 1987). Salutogenesis posits that life experiences shape the sense of coherence (SOCthat helps to mobilize resources to cope wi...

In taking a goal pursuit perspective into account, the present study examined associations between the context, process and outcome evaluation of an organizational health intervention (OHI) implemented within 29 teams in a hospital setting. In doing so, team climate for innovation as a context factor was measured at baseline (N = 529). Four to six...

This study aimed to examine how far group-level psychosocial and affective factors, as a relevant context, predict outcome expectancy as a process appraisal of an organizational health intervention. For this purpose, data from a university hospital (N = 250 representatives from 29 nursing wards) were collected. Participants took part in an interven...

Against the backdrop of increasingly blurred boundaries between work and nonwork, the purpose of this study was to investigate the implications of employees’ work-to-life boundary enactment for well-being. Using border/boundary theory (as reported by Ashforth, Kreiner, & Fugate (Academy of Management Review 25(3):472–491, 2000) and Clark (Human Rel...

Burnout is a widespread occupational stress outcome among child care teachers, jeopardizing the quality of care and children’s development. This study aimed at exploring the relationships between individual and organizational level characteristics (representing the six work-life areas control, reward, workload, community, fairness, and values) and...

AIM: The aim of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Norwegian version of the work-related sense of coherence scale, which measures the perceived comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness of an individual's current work situation. METHODS: Factorial validity, convergent and discriminant validity of the factors...

The term salutogenesis is associated with a variety of meanings that Aaron Antonovsky introduced in his 1979 book Health, Stress and Coping and expounded in many subsequent works. In its most thoroughly explicated meaning, salutogenesis refers to a model described in detail in Health, Stress and Coping, which posits that life experiences help shape...

This Part covers diverse applications of salutogenesis in key everyday settings across the life span: community/neighborhood, city, restorative environments, school, university, work, workers in prisons, and organizations. First, this chapter briefly introduces key concepts of everyday settings in health promotion. Second, the chapter highlights th...

Work is both detrimental and health promoting. Antonovsky accentuated the distinction between eliminating stressors and developing health-enhancing job characteristics. He elaborated on job characteristics that potentially relate to a sense of coherence, offering a dense description of a workplace where individuals experience meaningfulness, manage...

In highly organised societies, understanding how organisations influence employees’ health, customers’ health and population health is crucial for health promotion. As the immediate influence on employee health is particularly strong, the chapter focuses on this aspect. Based on a review of ongoing changes of the economy, of organising work and of...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether intervention participants’ process appraisals relate to change in well-being and lean outcomes of entire teams. For this purpose, the study focussed on two main characteristics of a lean implementation process – workshop quality and outcome expectancy – and their interaction with the part...

BACKGROUND Due to scarce resources in health care, staff deployment has to meet the demands. To optimise skill-grade-mix, a Swiss University Hospital initiated a project based on principles of Lean Management. The project team accompanied each participating nursing department and scientifically evaluated the results of the project. AIM The aim of...

Objectives: This study adds a multilevel perspective to the well-researched individual-level relationship between job resources and work engagement. In addition, we explored whether individual job resources cluster within work groups because of a shared psycho social environment and investigated whether a resource rich psychosocial work group envir...

Objectives This study adds a multilevel perspective to the well-researched individual-level relationship between job resources and work engagement. In addition, we explored whether individual job resources cluster within work groups because of a shared psychosocial environment and investigated whether a resource-rich psychosocial work group environ...

Center-based child care has been struggling with poor health and high turnover rates of child care staff and their adverse impact on care quality for decades. Yet little is known about personal and structural antecedents of job resources and job demands that are valid predictors of health and turnover in the child care workforce. Research Findings:...

Background: In light of an ageing and age-diverse workforce, it is imperative to understand how psychosocial aspects of work might influence health throughout working life. Recently, there has been an implicit call to differentiate job characteristics beyond the two factors of job demands and job resources. As needs, abilities and motivation fluct...

Background: The division of paid and unpaid labor in families continues to be highly gendered with men doing more paid work and women doing more unpaid care work. This is especially true for life stages with young children. Our study investigates the subjective experience of demands in the work and the private domain and the experience of work-lif...

This longitudinal study systematically examines the various roles played by the personal resource "sense of coherence" (SoC) in the motivational process described by the job-demands-resources model. SoC captures the extent to which people perceive their life as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful, and there is evidence of its influence in man...

To facilitate evaluation of complex, organisational health interventions (OHIs), this paper aims at developing a context, process, and outcome (CPO) evaluation model. It builds on previous model developments in the field and advances them by clearly defining and relating generic evaluation categories for OHIs. Context is defined as the underlying f...

Studies using the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model commonly have a heterogeneous focus concerning the variables they investigate—selective job demands and resources as well as burnout and work engagement. The present study applies the rationale of the JD-R model to expand the relevant outcomes of job demands and job resources by linking the JD-R...

Evidence based public health requires knowledge about successful dissemination of public health measures. This study analyses (a) the changes in worksite tobacco prevention (TP) in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland, between 2007 and 2009; (b1) the results of a multistep versus a “brochure only” dissemination strategy; (b2) the results of a monothem...

The literature on the health-promoting effects of community work has primarily dealt with the population in retirement age, yet the vast majority of volunteers are people still in the workforce. The aim of this study is to observe the relationship between volunteering and health within the context of working life, considering paid work conditions a...

This longitudinal study examined the consequences of job crafting on two important employee outcomes: psychological capital (PsyCap) as a work-related personal resource and work engagement as an indicator of employee well-being. The study also tested the reverse causation effects of PsyCap and work engagement on job crafting. It used a three-wave,...

Early detection and tailored treatment of job strain is important because it negatively affects the health condition of employees, the performance of organizations, and the overall costs of the health care system likewise. Although there exist several self-report instruments for measuring job strain, one major limitation is the low frequency of mea...

This study is the first that longitudinally examined change in occupational self‐efficacy ( OSE ) through individual and shared participation in occupational stress management courses ( SMC ). Applying the framework of social cognitive theory ( B andura, 1986, Social foundations of thought and action: A social cognitive theory . E nglewood C liffs,...

This study investigates the relationship between outcome expectancy for an individual stress management course and the total perceived impact of a comprehensive stress management intervention (SMI). It is based on data from 3 different measurement points from a longitudinal SMI in Switzerland. Individual and organizational outcome expectancies for...

Purpose – A growing body of literature provides evidence for the efficacy of workplace health promotion (WHP). However, little is known about effective dissemination strategies for WHP interventions. The purpose of this paper is to describe how a WHP agency in Zurich, Switzerland, used bulk mailings, information events, telephone marketing and free...

This study analyzed the relation and discrimination between five forms of job satisfaction (stabilized , progressive and resigned satisfaction; constructive and fixated dissatisfaction) regarding health, work-related determinants of health and demographic variables. Job satisfaction was assessed with a forced-choice survey item in 10 Swiss companie...

To understand the relationship between volunteering and health in the overlooked yet highly engaged working population, adopting a contextualizing balance approach. We hypothesize that volunteering may function as a psychosocial resource, contributing to work-life balance and, ultimately, health. A total of 746 Swiss workers participated in an onli...

Das Koharenzgefuhl wurde ursprunglich als globale, unspezifische Lebensorientierung eingefuhrt, die zwischen Gesundheitsressourcen und Stressbewaltigung vermittelt. Die drei Dimensionen Verstehbarkeit, Handhabbarkeit und Sinnhaftigkeit werden hier auf die Ebene der Arbeit und Organisation ubertragen, um mit dem arbeitsbezogenen Koharenzgefuhl (Work...

Employee surveys are an integral part of organisational health interventions as they are often used for initial problem assessment and evaluation purposes. In many cases, they constitute an active intervention element. Decreasing participation in such employee surveys is a common problem. The underlying reasons for decreasing participation are mult...

OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study was to examine the effect of a smoking ban on lung function, fractional exhaled nitric oxide, and respiratory symptoms in nonsmoking hospitality workers. METHODS: Secondhand smoke exposure at the workplace, spirometry, and fractional exhaled nitric oxide were measured in 92 nonsmoking hospitality workers before as w...