Can workplace psychosocial risk factors predict an employee’s decision to seek workplace counselling?

Abstract

There has been extensive research effort attempting to identify the factors that contribute to a person’s decision to seek psychological help. Specific factors have been distinguished as influential. Nevertheless these factors have not been consistently verified when it comes to seeking workplace counselling. Workplace counselling has known a significant development and business organizations are interested in appraising the usage of such a service by their employees and the return of their investment. The present research examined whether the employees’ decision to seek workplace counselling can be predicted by the workplace conditions and more specifically by the workplace psychosocial risk factors. The study was carried out in one of the largest companies of the Greek public sector. 402 employees of various specialties participated voluntarily by responding to two separate questionnaires; one measuring the attitudes towards seeking workplace counselling and one measuring the workplace psychosocial risk factors. The scores in seven categories of psychosocial risk factors and the score in attitudes towards seeking counselling were analyzed using multiple regression. Stepwise method was applied in order to form a model that included the most statistically significant psychosocial risk factors. The results demonstrated a weak positive correlation which did not support the predicting value of the workplace psychosocial risk factors. Two of the seven psychosocial risk factors were included in the model which explained only a 4% of the variance. The conclusion that an employee’s decision to seek workplace counselling is not strongly related to the external factors of the working environment is discussed along with other complementary assumptions.