><i>Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.</i><p>The study sounds like it is trying to blame the problem on the suffers (the "contagion" of their depression), but the obvious explanation of this is that by hiring from organizations with high stress, you're likely to be hiring perpetrators. That explains why it is not more likely to happen when the individual being hired is diagnosed ("Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis"), and also why it is more likely to happen when they enter a position of power ("The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.").<p>I am also not sure if the social contagion model has a lot of evidence for it. If you apply epidemiological models to any data you will get fits for epidemiological model parameters, and those will have a built-in epidemiological interpretation - but without prior knowledge that mental disorders are contagious (I thought most were definitely not?) you would just be making blind nonlinear curve fits to generic functions with many possible explanations.
I absolutely have noticed. In interviews, people coming from difficult and stressful positions absolutely radiate this in their interviews! I know that I will feel emotionally drained after an interview with such people. Further, I have explicitly worked to de-condition survival behaviors in negative organizations with new employees multiple times, and it wouldn't surprise me that these sorts of behaviors could be "contagious" in other organizations.
Be very careful who you waste your time working for.<p>So many companies are cesspools of mental trauma that are very inviting places for the unaware, and if you’re not strong of mind you get to subconsciously carry their issues with you for a long time after.
Interesting but I hope the takeaway isn't demonizing folks that are depressed or anxious, or having a thought-police toxic positivity style company culture.
In my old job I had to fake depression. I lived nice bachelor life, some coworkers were jealous and toxic. I lied that my gf left me. I nuked my social media and started posting cats for adoption...Latter got new girlfriend, 10 years older with two kids...<p>Work become easier. No stress and much less unpaid overtime.<p>Workplace culture influences people a lot.
> The effects are particularly strong for newcomers hired into managerial positions and newcomers with long previous tenures in unhealthy organizations.<p>If it was raw exposure to stressed/anxious people that was the issue, you wouldn't expect this. They're probably just measuring problem people moving between organizations. Someone had to make the unhealthy organization unhealthy in the first place, and that person was probably a manager or long time employee.
>Our findings reveal that when organizations hire employees from other, unhealthy organizations (those with a high prevalence of mental disorders), they “implant” depression, anxiety, and stress-related disorders into their workforces. Employees leaving unhealthy organizations act as “carriers” of these disorders regardless of whether they themselves have received a formal diagnosis of a mental disorder. The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position.<p>This sounds sort of like victim blaming to me. I've worked in a couple of bad environments and felt outright relief when I was able to go somewhere much better.<p>The answer is to do away with toxic work environments, not blame the person who suffered under them.
You don't even have to be at a place to catch it from there.<p>Just the other week, I was talking with a colleague who was in a depressing and stressful work situation, at another company where I've never been.<p>Hours later, I had an interview (elsewhere), and my brain was in a cautious-of-problems mode, and not the more appropriate excited-about-new-possibilities mode.<p>Afterwards, I realized it was reflected in questions I asked, voice tone, etc., and then realized why. :)
fifteen years ago in California Bay Area, when experienced programmers showed up a the door of pre-funded companies, and especially as phones with ads became a huge revenue source, one internal Human Resources message was "do not hire anyone that does not have a job already." This conveniently included those who had their own small business or side-gig priors, as well as those that did not work well enough with teams, and those newly graduated without work experience.<p>As the raw number of humans with some applicable skills increase world wide, and the disconnect between pre-funded wealthy environments and others increases, new invisible "flags" likely can be applied.<p>Not to defend the way business is done in China, but I have heard that when they assembled teams for an important new company, they often did not do as the West has done and cast infinitely large hiring nets with infinitely more nuanced and rare characteristics, rather in China the rumor is that they just used who they could find with a reasonable search, and got on with it..<p>Lastly, it is ironic that the divisive, command and control environments found in long-term stable business, are actually very negative to creative and open-minded people who want to try things.. Yet these "rules" might favor those in the stable business world, bringing all the anti-communication and top-down culture from there. odd times
Reminds me of how Psychiatrists have one if the highest suicide rates of all professions. Seems unusual; like an accountant who's insolvent, or a mechanics who's car always breaks down.
I suppose if I were trying to keep an epidemic out of my company if might extend the analogy with some of the following methods.<p>Screening and monitoring: watching new hires to see if they exhibit toxic or negative behaviours<p>Treatment: Help employees to get better treatment, both for personal issues, but also for negative learnt behaviours.
Need to do this study across a couple of economic cycles because the last few years have been atypical for both stress and hiring patterns.<p>It reads like Denmark has linked employment and health data so I guess they can do so for as far back as the records go.
I wonder if it is as easy as not hiring someone from other organization to prevent mental disease in your own.<p>What is the cause of the unhealthy behavior in the first place?
As opposed to social contagion, what is the origin?
Does sociopathy spread, too? That's more of a problem to an organization.<p>"The effect is especially pronounced if the newcomer holds a managerial position" is a huge concern if the new manager has sociopathic tendencies.
I’ve been reading about microbiomes and things like that over the past year, and I suspect there’s a biological aspect to a lot of mental health issues in workplaces. Certainly the pandemic has renewed public interest in it, but I think to put it in caveman terms: sick people leave sick germs where they go.<p>I haven’t read this paper yet, but it looks pretty cool so far. The abstract certainly makes it seem worth the read.<p>We seem to think ourselves as further removed from meatspace than we really are. We’re a lot more like colonies of ants, I think. What attacks the ant, attacks the colony.