The Positive Side of Occupational Health Psychology

This book serves as an introduction to the Nordic approach to Occupational Health Psychology and illustrates how this perspective can be transferred to a global audience. It discusses a joining of attitudes from Positive Psychology accompanied by experiences drawn from the Nordic work/life context. Over the decades, Nordic countries have gathered a great deal of experience on the meaningfulness of work, work engagement, presenteeism, absenteeism, job crafting, work family balance, intervention and reorganization. These experiences are explained and offered as a different approach to Occupational Health Psychology, while avoiding the more traditional detrimental topics such as stress, conflict burnout and poor well-being. Instead the authors discuss subjects such as engagement, healthy change, prosperity and welfare and are applied to the current ideas on Occupational Health Science. This book shows that using interdisciplinary observations can help our understanding of modern worker health. It offers gives readers an opportunity to consider how a combination of good work and good health can be stimulated in theory and in practice.

Per Oystein Saksvik is a professor at The Department of Psychology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (since 2001) where he also reached his Ph.D. in 1991 in Occupational Health Psychology. He has ten years of experience as contract researcher. He does research in occupational health and safety, organizational interventions, sickness absenteeism and presenteeism, and organizational change.

Marit Christensen has a PhD psychology and work as an associate professor at the Department of Psychology at the Norwegian University og Science and Technology (NTNU). Her research interests are related to positive occupational health psychology, health promoting work, work environment surveys, work engagement, co-workership and healthy productive organisations. She has been a project leader for two Nordic projects regarding positive factors at work, and now she is in the research group for the ARK-project (work and climate surveys in the academic sector)

. The ARK research platform at the time consists of data from 19 different institutions where 15000 respondents have participated.