Stress and well-being in the workplace: Support for key propositions from the social identity approach.

Of all the domains in which issues of well-being rear their head, the workplace is one of the most prominent. Apart from anything else, this is because it is apparent that an unhealthy workforce is an unproductive one. In recognition of this point, the ®nancial costs of mismanaging well-being are of considerable interest to labour economists and organizational policy makers. For example, a recent report by the UK's National Director for Health and Work, Dame Carol Black (2008), estimated that in Britain around 175 million working days were lost to sickness in 2006 (around 7 per employee), and that work-related ill health costs the country in excess of £100 bn a year ± more than the entire health budget of the National Health Service and around £4,000 for every employee. Black's report laid much of the blame for this on the fact that nearly half of all UK organizations had no policy for managing issues of health and sickness in the workplace, and, accordingly, had taken no proactive steps to try to minimize this impact. While at an economic level this would seem to be a major oversight, at a human one it would seem to be catastrophic. For, as Black's report highlights, by failing to tackle these issues directly, organizations are not only being ®nancially negligent, they are also greatly increasing the sum of human distress and misery ± impacting not just on individuals, but also on their families and on society as a whole.