IFPM Center for
Healthy leadership
The IFPM Center for Healthy Leadership researches effective leadership and HR strategies for promoting mental health in companies.
Central questions of Healthy Leadership:
- Which leadership strategies can promote the mental health of employees and thereby enable healthy high performance in organizations?
- What do effective HR strategies for promoting mental health in companies need to look like? In what way must HR and managers act as partners to promote health?
- What are the effects of increasing complexity and uncertainty in a volatile working world, as well as mobile and flexible forms of work, on the mental health of employees? What are the implications for leadership?
- How can the mental health of managers themselves be promoted, and what impact does this have on the health and performance of individual employees, but also entire teams and companies?
Numerous studies prove a steady deterioration of the mental health of employees in western industrialized nations (Eurostat, 2010; International Labor Organization, 2013). For example, the Job Stress Index Switzerland (2020) shows that almost a third of the employees surveyed feel quite or very exhausted from their work, which causes annual damage of CHF 7.6 billion for employers. In Germany, around 15% of all days of absence in companies are due to impairments of mental health (German Federal Ministry of Health, 2021).
Current challenges such as demographic change, competition for the best minds and the increasing complexity and digitization of work processes underline the responsibility of managers for the health of employees, teams and entire organizations, in short: For workplace health promotion. Effective leadership is regarded as a decisive factor in avoiding psychological overload, as well as a central lever for promoting positive energy and commitment at work. At the same time, however, managers in particular represent a risk group for stress and burnout due to sharply increasing demands in everyday leadership.
Even if exhaustion and burnout are generally regarded as individual phenomena, entire teams, departments and organizations can also burn out emotionally. Through processes such as social contagion, health in companies can deteriorate rapidly and burnout can spread from the individual to the collective level in the company. Another cause for “collective burnout” is the so-called acceleration trap, in which approx. 50% of the organizations were stuck. In this case, teams or the organization as a whole reach their limits and beyond due to multiple, continuous or overloads. Therefore, interventions in the area of Healthy Leadership are important both with regard to individuals and entire teams and companies, especially against the background of a complex and volatile working world.
The connection between health and individual as well as corporate performance has been repeatedly proven. Our own research clearly shows that high-performance companies have the lowest burnout rates. The reasons for this lie in particular in a significantly better leadership quality, strongly decentralized decision-making structures, a supportive culture and higher r identification with the work.
Home office and resilience
As part of a global stratified study, we are investigating the effects of new forms of work, in particular working in the home office. The focus here is on the questions of how working in the home office is beneficial or detrimental to the health and performance of employees. We are also dealing with the question of how and to what extent home offices should be used and what organizations and managers can do to best support employees in this work context.
Health effects of complementary leadership behavior
In recent years, various studies have shown the relevance of a combination of different leadership styles (e.g. Zhang et al., 2015). The basic assumption here is that managers must master the widest possible repertoire of different behaviors in order to be able to react effectively to the increasing complexity, uncertainty and volatility of the modern working world. In a current multi-method study, we are investigating the effects of so-called “paradoxical leadership behavior” on the health of a total of 100 employees. Here we bring together data from various sources, including quantitative questionnaire data from a diary study, but also objective health data such as the heart rate variability of the participants, in order to show how managers should lead in order to effectively promote the emotional, mental and physical health of their employees.
Federal Employment Agency
The main tasks of the largest service provider on the labor market in Germany are placement in training and jobs, career guidance, employer advice, services to maintain and create jobs and wage replacement benefits.
Center for Disability and Integration (CDI-HSG)
The CDI-HSG is an interdisciplinary research center that examines the integration of people with disabilities into the labor market from the perspective of various research areas (especially management, psychology and economics). The CDI-HSG is affiliated with the Swiss Institute for Empirical Economic Research (SEW-HSG) and the Institute for Leadership and Human Resource Management (IFPM-HSG)
energy factory St.Gallen AG
The energy factory St. Gallen is the spin-off of the Institute for Leadership and Human Resource Management (IFPM) of the University of St.Gallen
Demographie-Netzwerk ddn e.V.
The Demographie-Netzwerk ddn e.V. is an association of more than 300 companies and organizations that are responsible for a total of more than 2,000,000 employees. The ddn is funded by the Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs
Oberwaid Medical Center
The Oberwaid offers services in upscale hotels and restaurants and in the healthcare sector.
