Projects

Service robots in health and elderly care

The healthcare industry is facing significant personnel shortages, leading to a search for alternative labor sources such as service robots. Despite remarkable technological advancements, our understanding of service robots remains limited. Moreover, existing literature highlights consumer resistance towards the integration of these technological entities. This project aims to investigate the factors that drive and hinder the acceptance of service robots specifically in health and elderly care. Our research will provide valuable insights into how service robots can be effectively integrated into healthcare environments. 

Researchers: Jenny van Doorn and Jana Holthöwer

Risk management and inter-organizational control in public hospitals

A longitudinal case study of the design of a shared risk management system for five hospitals, focusing specifically on the co-construction of risk management systems and the organizational structures surrounding them. This study began in 2017 and has provided insights into how risk management systems change over time and the conditions for their successful implementation.

Researchers: Jacob Reilley (University of Groningen), Christian Huber (Copenhagen Business School) and Nadine Gerhardt-Huber (Helmut-Schmidt-University, Hamburg) 

Paid unlimited holidays

Using a field experiment (cluster-randomized controlled trial) covering a period of one year, our research team examines the effects of a paid unlimited leave policy on health (i.e., absenteeism), well-being (work engagement, job satisfaction) and job performance. In addition, the goal of the project is to identify key factors to improve the policy, to facilitate the implementation process and improve communication about the policy. In addition, we aim to better understand behavioral and cultural aspects of team dynamics that are at play when an unlimited leave policy is introduced in a company.

Involved: ING bank, Professor Jessica de Bloom (Universtity of Groningen), Professor Jana Kühnel (Goethe University Frankfurt), Professor Christine Syrek (University of Applied Sciences Bonn/Rhein-Sieg, Rheinbach), Professor Tim Vahle-Hinz (Humboldt University of Berlin) and research assistant Erika Varik (University of Groningen)

Hybrid work and mental health

The project aim is to understand how employees’ and leaders’ goals guide daily work location choices in the hybrid work context. Researchers are also investigating how alignment and mismatch between goals and location choices predict paradoxical effects on mental health, well-being, task performance, sense of belonging, distress, and career progression. This will ultimately contribute to a better scientific and applied understanding of goal-directed behaviour in context and its paradoxical outcomes.

Researchers: Eleni Giannakoudi (PhD, University of Groningen), Professor Jessica de Bloom (University of Groningen), Professor Susanne Scheibe (University of Groningen) and Assistant Professor Anita Keller (University of Groningen)

Crafting life for health and well-being: Understanding different types of crafting in everyday life and in challenging times

In the new flexible (tele)working life, life domains increasingly overlap and a holistic view on life, including both work and leisure, is urgently needed. The overall goal of this project is to better understand how the different forms of job crafting, off-job crafting, and boundary crafting are related and form patterns of crafting, as well as to examine predictors (i.e., stable, situational, and crisis-related) as well as health and well-being related outcomes of single and combined crafting behaviors. The project will pave the way for creating a more meaningful and sustainable (working) life in which employees take an active role in aligning their environment with their personal needs, preferences, and abilities. Beyond this project, our findings will directly inform the parallel development of hybrid crafting interventions combining in-company training and digital tools (websites & smartphone applications).

Researchers: Jessica de Bloom (University of Groningen), Georg Bauer (University of Zürich), Philipp Kerksieck (University of Zürich), Anja Morstatt (University of Zürich), Kang Leng Ho (University of Zürich), Martin Tusl (University of Zürich)

Health-oriented leadership

Keeping employees healthy in highly stressful times at work is essential for today’s organizations. Health-oriented leadership (HoL) is a leadership approach that emphasizes the promotion and maintenance of employees' health and well-being. This concept integrates health-related activities into the daily responsibilities of leaders and focuses on creating a supportive work environment. It has been developed and first published 10 years ago and has sparked many empirical studies looking at its effects on employee health. Therefore, we now synthesize these results and conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis to further show its relevance for workplace health.

Research team: Dr. Miriam Arnold (University of Groningen) in collaboration with Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research and Helmut Schmidt University Hamburg

This project focuses on improving maternal health care, with three key objectives:

1.  Examining Intrapartum Healthcare Quality: Our first aim is to examine the quality of intrapartum healthcare (the care that a woman receives during labour) within the framework of the World Health Organization, focusing on the Dutch population. This research is conducted in collaboration with the University Medical Centre Groningen, the University Medical Centre Amsterdam, and the University of Western Sydney.

2. Health Policy Analysis: The second objective is to evaluate municipal health policies, in particular regarding smoking, assess their interactions with individuals and measure the impact on health outcomes within specific subgroups. This research involves health policy scoring and mapping, in collaboration with the UG’s Faculty of Law and GeoDienst.

3. Healthcare Economics: The third aim is to examine the impact of different birth trajectories on healthcare costs by linking the data registry of general practitioner clinics on a national level. This research is also in collaboration with the University Medical Centre Groningen.

Researchers: Viola Angelini, Laura Viluma, Lilian Peters and Tamool A.S. Muhamed

While the association of adverse environmental stressors with adverse population health outcomes is well documented, less is known about the variability in population health outcomes across communities with similar environmental stressors (e.g., the built environment but also the availability of green spaces and supply of unhealthy food). However, a limited, but emerging, literature is highlighting that such within-group differences are substantial and provide a potential ally for public health interventions that hitherto has remained underutilized by policy makers. These within-group differences in population health outcomes provide a natural indicator of the resilience of a community to environmental stressors.

The project will establish the variation of non-communicable disease (NCD) comorbidities (two or more NCDs occurring at once in one patient) for a given level of environmental stress and assess how this variation differs along different levels of the environmental stress index. In addition, it will employ cross-sectional and longitudinal econometrics and machine learning techniques to determine the relationship between environmental stressors and population health.

This project is part of a larger project, ECOTIP, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and led by the University of Leiden. The overall aim of the project is to identify tipping points where the living environment leads to ecosyndemics (i.e. negative disease interactions that result from environmental changes caused by humans).

Researchers: Erik Buskens, Jochen Mierau, Dominika Osicka, Stefan Pichler, Oskar Roemeling, Mariana Soares, Laura Viluma

Of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), four do not mandate universal access to short-term paid sick leave for employees: Canada, Japan, Korea, and the United States. Traditionally, in the United States, employers have voluntarily provided paid sick leave. In the past decade (short-term) sick leave mandates and (longer-term) medical leave mandates have been introduced in many states and cities. In this project we estimate the impact of these mandates on different outcomes.

Our results so far suggest an increase in coverage and utilization, leading to fewer influenza and covid-19 infections, while wages and employment were not affected. Finally, we find some evidence that firms were providing additional non-mandated benefits after the introduction of these mandates.

Researcher: Stefan Pichler

Balancing employer and employee incentives: how to design optimal disability insurance?

This project explores how to promote a healthy working life until retirement, with a focus on sick leave and disability. We specifically investigate the role of employers in supporting partially sick workers within the public sick leave and disability insurance system. In the Netherlands, employers bear a significant financial responsibility for these workers within the public social insurance system, more so than in many other countries. While this can motivate firms to retain disabled employees, it may also lead to higher labor costs, selective hiring practices, layoffs, or even bankruptcies. Our research aims to identify the optimal level of employer responsibility that balances the support for sick and disabled workers while maintaining a fair and efficient labor market. We assess the impact of various policy changes in the Netherlands on employer behavior, disability insurance inflow, and the labor market outcomes for affected workers.

Research team: Laura Jansen (PhD-student, University of Groningen), Max Groneck (Associate Professor, University of Groningen), Viola Angelini (Professor, University of Groningen), Raun van Ooijen (Assistant Professor, University of Groningen, University Medical Centre Groningen), Netspar

Health Risks in Old Age: Implications for Household Savings and Insurance

This project investigates the determinants of long-term care utilization and mortality and their implications for using private and public pensions and long-term care insurance. The first aim is to examine the extent to which care needs, informal care, and financial resources influence life expectancy, the duration of long-term care, and transitions between care types, such as home-based care and nursing home care. Differences in long-term care use and mortality result in pension benefits and long-term care insurance being paid out over longer periods to certain households, leading to redistribution within public insurance systems and making some households more inclined to purchase private insurance than others, i.e. adverse selection. Therefore, our second aim is to determine the extent of redistribution within public insurance systems arising from socioeconomic differences in life expectancy and long-term care utilization, and whether adverse selection can be mitigated by offering a new type of insurance product in the Netherlands: a combined pension and long-term care insurance.

Researchers: Jeroen van der Vaart, Rob Alessie, Max Groneck, and Raun van Ooijen