Math Janssen

An increasing number of employees suffer from work stress, especially those working in health care and education. In 2019, almost one in six Dutch employees and one in five Dutch teachers mentioned stress and burnout complaints. Of all Dutch employees, health care professionals and teachers, especially teachers in secondary vocational schools, reported the highest work pressure, defined as a combination of high job demands and little professional autonomy. Many interventions are aimed to decrease work stress or teach employees to deal with it. However, the effects of these interventions on actual work stress and mental health are still largely unknown.

This thesis describes the effects of a combination of two interventions on the mental health of teachers working in secondary vocational schools: mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), being a person-centred intervention and an organisational intervention aimed to influence job demands and resources.

In Chapter 1, I described how my personal motivation and ambition for this dissertation – largely based on almost 20 years of experience as a consultant/trainer/ coach in work and health – inspired me to study the effectiveness of MBSR, being an individual-focused secondary/tertiary health intervention. I chose to combine MBSR with an additional, primary organisational health intervention because stress results from a complex interaction between environmental factors (work and personal circumstances) and the individual. Since teachers in secondary vocational schools report the highest work pressure of all Dutch employees, we chose them to be the target group in our study. After all, maintaining and improving the high quality of education in the Netherlands requires healthy teachers.

In this dissertation, we applied a conceptual (heuristic) model inspired by the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) model because of its distinction between person (personal resources) and job characteristics (job demands and resources) and its generic applicability to work situations. Accordingly, we used the International Labour Organization’s definition of work stress, which is based on the JD-R model: ‘... the harmful physical and emotional response caused by an imbalance between the perceived demands and the perceived resources and abilities of individuals to cope with those demands’.

The overall goal of this dissertation is to contribute to the body of scientific and practical knowledge about MBSR/mindfulness and its effects on employees’ mental health and other work-related variables (e.g., work performance, personal competencies, and work-related perceptions). The first subgoal of this study is to increase scientific knowledge about the effectiveness of MBSR as an individual-focused intervention on employees’ mental health (especially of teachers in secondary vocational schools) and on other work-related variables. The second subgoal is to provide insight into the additional effectiveness of a participatory, preventive organisational health intervention on individuals’ mental health and other work-related variables. The third subgoal is to explore the effects of