Major political transformations can have an influence on employee wellbeing

Work in times of Brexit: New survey on the relationship between macropolitical events and personal wellbeing. Significant societal and political transitions, such as Brexit, can impact employee wellbeing - although not necessarily in the ways that might be expected. Researchers based at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), the Leibniz Institute for Resilience Research (LIR), Loughborough University, and Medical School Hamburg asked academics who worked at a British research institution how they felt about the UK's exit from the EU. The results showed that those surveyed experienced Brexit as threatening rather than as positively challenging. "This, in its turn, impacted on how they perceived their job security and the quality of social relationships with colleagues," said Miriam Schilbach, lead author of the corresponding article recently published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology. Schilbach is a doctoral candidate in the Work, Organizational, and Business Psychology department, headed by Professor Thomas Rigotti, at the JGU Institute of Psychology and a research associate at LIR. Job security and quality of co-worker relationships are prominent determinants of employee wellbeing.