Occupational health psychology (OHP) is an interdisciplinary area of psychology that is concerned with the health and safety of workers. OHP addresses a number of major topic areas including the impact of occupational stressors on physical and mental health, the impact of involuntary unemployment on physical and mental health, work–family balance, workplace violence and other forms of mistreatment, psychosocial workplace factors that affect accident risk and safety, and interventions designed to improve and/or protect worker health. Although OHP emerged from two distinct disciplines within applied psychology, namely, health psychology and industrial and organizational (I-O) psychology, historical evidence suggests that the origins of OHP lie in occupational health/occupational medicine. For many years the psychology establishment, including leaders of I-O psychology, rarely dealt with occupational stress and employee health, creating a need for the emergence of OHP.
OHP has also been informed by other disciplines. These disciplines include sociology, industrial engineering, and economics, as well as preventive medicine and public health. OHP is thus concerned with the relationship of psychosocial workplace factors to the development, maintenance, and promotion of workers' health and that of their families. For example, the World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization estimated that exposure to long working hours, a risk factor extensively studied by researchers allied to OHP, led 745,000 workers to die from ischemic heart disease and stroke in 2016. The impact of long work days is likely mediated by occupational stress, suggesting that less burdensome working conditions are needed to better protect the health of workers.
