Simona Šarotar Žižek

By Simona Šarotar Žižek, Matjaž Mulej and Vesna Čančer

Purpose: The law on health and safety at work was implemented in Slovenia in 2011. On this basis, Slovenian organizations started preparation and implementation of workplace health promotion (WHP) programs. The article reports on research of the Slovenian leaders’ leadership style concerning their employees’ health following the new legislation.

Part of the book: Occupational Health

By Simona Šarotar Žižek and Vesna Čančer

Stress among employees is a significant issue in each organization and society because of its costs on individual, organizational, and society levels. Addressing and reducing stress is thus an important goal, which leads humans to well-being. The main role of managing stress at work belongs to leaders. Their leadership can have effects on the level of stress of employees as well as for themselves. They also decide about their systemic approaches for overcoming stress within organizations. We therefore conducted a stress (qualitative and quantitative) research of employees and leaders within organizations with the main goal to find out the differences between their stresses. The main purpose of this article was to research stress among leaders and employees and to compare their perceived physical and psychical well-being (and stress). For this purpose, we used descriptive statistics and Mann-Whitney U-test. We confirmed that (1) leaders report a higher frequency of some kinds of the daily work stress than employees, (2) on average, leaders were more frequently under pressure than employees, (3) on average, leaders had more frequently satisfying sleep than employees, and (4) on average, employees could use their strong points at work less frequently than leaders.

Part of the book: Quality of Life and Quality of Working Life

By Simona Šarotar Žižek and Matjaž Mulej

We report about a new non-technological innovation aimed to manage socioeconomic crises. Economic theory cannot manage them: it is too one-sided. The model suggests solving the crises with requisite holism (RH), social responsibility (SR), human personal requisite holism (HPRH), and well-being (WB). Qualitative analysis using RH, SR, HPRH, WB, and dialectical systems theory (DST) was applied in this research. Field research covered Slovene midsize enterprises. Findings include the following: The global and local political and economic decision-makers poorly know and use systemic behavior; they are therefore one-sided rather than requisitely holistic and caused the current global socioeconomic and environmental crisis. RH/SR would make decision-makers more/requisitely holistic, honest, and reliable. RH/SR supports holism better, if upgraded with increasing WB, not welfare alone. Both RH/SR and WB support HPRH. Their innovative synergy WB&RH/SR leads to the solution of crises. DST backs WB&RH/SR methodologically. Research was qualitative analysis in desk and previous field research. Its practical implications show that the RH/SR/WB/DST/HPRH approach to managing socioeconomic crises helps practitioners essentially to avoid oversights and failures. Available literature offers no similar concept.

Part of the book: Quality of Life and Quality of Working Life