A new paper in Scientific Reports explores suffering and its consequences for health and well-being. Although suffering is a ubiquitous part of the human experience, the extant empirical literature on suffering is characterized by a disproportionate focus on Western samples and older adults living with physical illness. Such evidence has provided some insight into the antecedents, experiences, and consequences of suffering that are relevant to clinical populations of adults who are dealing with physical health symptoms and illness, but knowledge of these dynamics among healthy adults and people living in non-Western contexts is more limited. Indeed, only recently has empirical research begun to show that suffering has relevance among nonclinical populations living both within and beyond the traditional boundaries of the West.
One setting in which suffering appears to have relevance is work. Previous studies have found that suffering is associated with lower well-being in a variety of life domains, and evidence from studies involving workers suggest that lower well-being in life can negatively affect well-being at work and job performance. The potential impacts of suffering on an employee’s well-being and performance could have downstream consequences on the organization more broadly (e.g., lower profitability), which may further jeopardize the livelihood of employees who are suffering (e.g., potential termination of employment). Although “silence about suffering at work” (p. 8) represents an obstacle to promoting occupational health and maximizing work performance, organizations are also uniquely positioned to support the needs of their employees because of how much time employees typically spend engaged with the organizations for which they work. For example, the average adult spends up to half of their daily waking hours at work, and most working adults spend more time during an average week engaged in work than any other activity besides sleep. Thus, an expanded literature on suffering and its implications for the well-being of workers could provide organizations with insights that inform how they can strengthen their commitment to promoting worker well-being and further cultivate a ‘caring climate’ by supporting employees who are suffering. In the present set of studies, the authors use longitudinal data from samples of healthy workers employed in Western and non-Western contexts to examine the associations between suffering and a variety of subsequent health and well-being outcomes.
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