ABSTRACT
Work, in addition to providing financial rewards, has a pronounced role in ensuring workers’ healthiness and well-being. Based on their employment type, workers pervasively get exposed to varying occupational hazards at the workplace that not only affect them but also tax the entire occupational hygiene. Tremendous changes (such as the prominence of precarious contracts, contingent workforces, globalization, work intensification, etc.) underwent by the world of work in recent decades have intensified the already prevalent hazardous psychosocial factors in the work environment, thereby professing fresh challenges to the organizations’ occupational wellness. Prominently arising out of the work design, context, organization, and management, these factors are considerable contributors to employee’s counterproductive physiological and/or psychological health outcomes.
However, the promotion of psychological capital among employees, that incorporates resilience amongst its prime components, can be an expedient protective factor against these counterproductive outcomes. Enhanced resilience improves health, well-being, and life quality, along with bearing a positive association with industrious work outcomes such as greater job satisfaction, better performance and productivity levels, etc. When weighed against the standard workplace hazard and risk management approaches, positive interventions exhibit superior receptivity at contemporary workplaces.
The concept of positive organizational behavior (POB) is of growing interest among positive psychology, management, and health researchers as an object of study of occupational health. This chapter reviews the salient contemporary psychosocial hazards pervading across workplaces and introduces the POB concept of psychological resilience, as a means to address an array of detrimental outcomes resulting from these hazards. The role that fostering worker resilience has in improving workplace health has been highlighted. Also, an overview of the interventions and strategies to be adopted for building up a resilient industrial workforce has been provided.
