The effects of workplace bullying and harassment on employee mental health and ways to prevent it.
CW1: Essay Question – Designing a Wellbeing Intervention
Essay question:
“Critically present and discuss the design of an intervention to tackle a key well-being issue within the workplace.” Identify and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed intervention; how does it work and who is responsible for their implementation.
Background information:
Improving the psychological well-being of a workforce brings benefits for both the individual employees and the organisation as a whole. For organisations, the business case for investing in psychological well-being is strong and associates with improved outcomes for organisations, including lower levels of turnover, sickness absence, and improved work performance.
The intervention discussed in your essay should convey the core message that psychological well-being can make a difference to work, individuals’ working lives and the success of organisations.
The wellbeing intervention you will propose can belong in one of two main categories: either focusing on treatment (i.e. interventions implemented once a health and wellbeing
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issue has been identified), or focusing on prevention (i.e. interventions introduced to prevent the likelihood of reduced wellbeing occurring).
What will the markers be looking for?
The markers will be looking for an in-depth discussion of your proposed intervention which will aim to tackle a key well-being issue within the workplace. A critical discussion of different theories, models and psychological evidence relating to the presented well-being issue is expected. This module will introduce different topics from which you can choose, including but not limited to stress, bullying and harassment, resilience, and work-life balance. If you choose stress, for example, you might elaborate on and compare the Job Demand-Resources model (JD-R) and the Person-Environment Fit theory to provide a greater explanation of stress development and its impact on both the individual and the organisation.
The marker will expect an indication of how the well-being issue can affect employee work outcomes (e.g. motivation, engagement and performance) and how the proposed intervention will allow individuals and organisations to deal with this issue.
Remember, you need to ensure that you base your answer on newly introduced or previously discussed psychological theory and empirical evidence, where possible.
What is the structure of the essay?
The Introduction:
• An introduction to the essay to state the well-being issue covered and why, as well as a brief reference to the designed intervention. This section should set the scene for your essay and its content, expanding on the necessity of intervening.
• The main body of the essay should provide a clear, coherent, and critical description of the intervention presented to tackle the discussed well-being issue. Your answer should thoroughly discuss the questions below:
1. What is this intervention about? What does it include? Will the wellbeing intervention focus on prevention or on treatment? For example, you may elaborate on stress prevention initiatives, or on interventions aiming to manage and reduce stress.
2. What would the outcome of the intervention be? Would the intervention effectively contribute to behavioural change? Would we expect, for example, individuals who are exposed to the intervention to acquire skills which will help them cope with stress? Or could the intervention contribute to organizational change, impacting for example on how work is arranged?
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3. When expanding on the interventions’ effectiveness you should consider the role that each member of the organisation (e.g. top and lower management, HR staff and the employees) should play during its implementation.
4. Please note that you must consider and acknowledge ethical guidelines relating to the intervention presented.
5. Your intervention should conclude with a discussion about evaluation. Think about how to monitor, measure and evaluate the wellbeing intervention, including information on what to measure, how frequently to measure and how to safely store the data. This is very important as your intervention should make meaningful changes for the benefit of the workforce, learning from any possible mistakes. You should aspire to firmly place organisations in a great place; a place where people want to work and where their well- being is looked after.
6. A concluding paragraph is required summarising what was your essay’s focus and contribution. Final remarks about the intervention: Well-reasoned discussion of strengths/limitations and future applications/implications of the intervention.
7. The coursework should end with a reference list. Your reference list should be in APA (7th edition) only, any other referencing style or any inconsistencies will be considered when providing feedback and grades. Your submission should be well presented in the appropriate format as described above and should be coherent and well-structured with attention to language and grammar. (Writing support can be found at Centre for Academic writing CAW). Following the APA format (7th edition), all citations should be double line spaced and have a hanging indent in a Reference List. A “hanging indent” means that each subsequent line after the first line of your citation should be indented by 0.5 inches. You can find a sample here: ld.php (up.edu)
