Mental health at work A multilevel perspective on individual, team, leader, and organizational factors

Work can support or undermine employee mental health. This dissertation examines how factors at the individual, team, leader, and organizational levels relate to employee mental health, separately and in combination, and how multilevel interventions are designed and evaluated.
A survey among 210 employees in 53 project teams (Chapter 2) showed that mental health-specific leadership was not associated with burnout or work engagement, but positively with perceived team support and health-related helping behavior. Stronger stigmatizing attitudes among employees weakened the first association and strengthened the second. A realist evaluation of a team crafting intervention, based on 14 interviews (Chapter 3), suggested that strengths reflection, peer feedback, and joint action planning contributed to team cohesion, psychological safety, and collective efficacy. Workload, team stability, and leadership support shaped whether teams sustained these changes. A scoping review of 30 multilevel interventions (Chapter 4) found that most targeted two or three levels, that cross-level alignment varied widely, and that fewer than one third measured outcomes at all targeted levels. Two experiments on negative performance feedback (Chapter 5) showed that compassionate leader feedback improved thriving and affect, but this effect disappeared after a subsequent reflection task. Self-compassionate reflection improved these outcomes more consistently. Leader compassion and self-compassion did not reinforce each other.
The findings suggest that leadership and team processes matter for employee mental health, and that their effects depend on the multilevel context. Multilevel interventions need an explicit rationale for how actions at different levels work together, and outcome measurement at each targeted level.