Health at Work

In the last decades a growing number of firms are concerned with employee health. More and more companies offer health enhancing practices such as e.g. classes on healthy living, health risk appraisals, and surveys on health protection that can either be implemented separately or bundled into comprehensive workplace health promotion programs. Additionally, so called innovative work practices are increasingly applied in order to benefit employee well-being. In this respect, e.g. a varied job, self-organization of work, and opportunities to learn on the job are implemented separately or in bundles.

The present doctoral thesis consists of three essays concerning both, firms' growing tendency to offer health promotion activities at the worksite and the intensified implementation of innovative work practices promising positive effects for the employer as well as the employee. More precisely, the first paper tries to identify factors that influence a firm's decision to offer a comprehensive workplace health promotion program. The second paper analyzes the performance effects associated with an offer of a comprehensive workplace health promotion program. Finally, the third paper takes the worker perspective into account. It aims at identifying health effects associated with innovative practices and by doing so gives additional insight into the effects of firms' health enhancing activities.

The empirical analyses within the first paper reveal that general and specific worker skills are crucial when trying to explain establishment rationality of investments in employee health. The existence of a works council, expected problems associated with employee sick-leave and the aging of the workforce, the physical resilience of a workplace as well as firm size are also factors whose relevance for a firm's offer of health promoting activities is confirmed empirically. The econometric analysis within the second paper provides some evidence for positive productivity effects associated with an increase in the workplace health promotion program intensity. When more restrictive definitions of the dependent such as e.g. profitability or value added are used, this positive effect vanishes though. When value added divided by total wage costs is chosen as the outcome variable, the results even reveal negative profitability effects associated with an increase in a firm's workplace health promotion intensity. Within the third paper, the results reveal no significant effects when sick leave is chosen as the outcome variable. For the rather subjective health variables self-rated health and satisfaction with health the results reveal that an increasing extent of innovative work practices a worker is confronted with affects perceived worker health positively.