Giving People with Tough Jobs Adequate Resources So That They Don’t Drink to Cope

People who have a really tough job, one that may involve being exposed to danger to themselves or others (like a firefighter), sometimes drink to cope, particularly after critical incidents that cause extraordinary levels of stress.  No surprise there.  Other than individual interventions, is there anything an employer can do to prevent that from happening?

Samuel Bacharach and his colleagues believe so.  Their study found a relationship between the adequacy of the resources in the workplace and employee drinking to cope.  This resource adequacy showed up in both the connection between the critical incidents and the resultant stress and between the stress and the drinking behavior.  Resource inadequacy seems to make these front-line workers vulnerable both to stress and to maladaptive coping behaviors.

The flip side of this is a cautionary tale for managers of such people – deny needed resources to your employees not only at the risk of their ability to perform, but at the risk of their health.

This close connection between the systems quadrant (lower-right) and the intentions quadrant (upper-left) of the "all-quadrants" component of the AQAL Integral Model is a familiar one in the world of organizations -- the systems in which we are imbedded have a direct and sometimes profound intent on our inner lives, one to which integrally-informed managers will attend.

(From "Firefighters, Critical Incidents, and Drinking to Cope: The Adequacy of Unit-Level Performance Resources as a Source of Vulnerability and Protection", by Bacharach, Bamberger, and Doveh, 2008 JAP 63(1), 155-169).