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Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour
BACKGROUND: Exercising and eating healthy are not just an individual choice, but influenced by family members, friends, or neighbours. Little is known, however, about colleagues, who are another important interpersonal influence. Many people spend many hours at work, surrounded by mostly the same co...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
BioMed Central
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9628058/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36319982 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14394-0 |
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author | van der Put, Anne Ellwardt, Lea |
author_facet | van der Put, Anne Ellwardt, Lea |
author_sort | van der Put, Anne |
collection | PubMed |
description | BACKGROUND: Exercising and eating healthy are not just an individual choice, but influenced by family members, friends, or neighbours. Little is known, however, about colleagues, who are another important interpersonal influence. Many people spend many hours at work, surrounded by mostly the same colleagues, who could therefore significantly shape employees’ (un)healthy choices. We studied to what extent colleagues may play a part in one another’s eating and exercise behaviours by focusing on two pathways: colleagues can encourage a healthy lifestyle or act as role models whose behaviours can be observed and copied. METHODS: We used the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, with data on 4345 employees in 402 teams in 113 organisations. We used network autocorrelation models, which resemble regression models, to study to what extent employee encouragement is related to fruit and vegetable consumption, and physical activity. Specific to this type of model is the inclusion of a network correlation parameter which allows for the outcome of an employee to be directly associated with the outcomes of their colleagues. In this way we tested whether colleagues’ behaviours were related to one another. RESULTS: We found that employees were more likely to eat fruit and vegetables as well as engage in physical activity when their colleagues encourage a healthy lifestyle. Employees’ healthy eating behaviours were positively related to their colleagues’ fruit and vegetable consumption, while we found a negative correlation concerning physical activity. CONCLUSION: Overall, colleagues’ encouragement and own healthy behaviours have the potential to contribute to creating a culture of health in the workplace and support all employees in making healthy choices. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9628058 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | BioMed Central |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-96280582022-11-03 Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour van der Put, Anne Ellwardt, Lea BMC Public Health Research BACKGROUND: Exercising and eating healthy are not just an individual choice, but influenced by family members, friends, or neighbours. Little is known, however, about colleagues, who are another important interpersonal influence. Many people spend many hours at work, surrounded by mostly the same colleagues, who could therefore significantly shape employees’ (un)healthy choices. We studied to what extent colleagues may play a part in one another’s eating and exercise behaviours by focusing on two pathways: colleagues can encourage a healthy lifestyle or act as role models whose behaviours can be observed and copied. METHODS: We used the European Sustainable Workforce Survey, with data on 4345 employees in 402 teams in 113 organisations. We used network autocorrelation models, which resemble regression models, to study to what extent employee encouragement is related to fruit and vegetable consumption, and physical activity. Specific to this type of model is the inclusion of a network correlation parameter which allows for the outcome of an employee to be directly associated with the outcomes of their colleagues. In this way we tested whether colleagues’ behaviours were related to one another. RESULTS: We found that employees were more likely to eat fruit and vegetables as well as engage in physical activity when their colleagues encourage a healthy lifestyle. Employees’ healthy eating behaviours were positively related to their colleagues’ fruit and vegetable consumption, while we found a negative correlation concerning physical activity. CONCLUSION: Overall, colleagues’ encouragement and own healthy behaviours have the potential to contribute to creating a culture of health in the workplace and support all employees in making healthy choices. BioMed Central 2022-11-01 /pmc/articles/PMC9628058/ /pubmed/36319982 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14394-0 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
spellingShingle | Research van der Put, Anne Ellwardt, Lea Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour |
title | Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour |
title_full | Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour |
title_fullStr | Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour |
title_full_unstemmed | Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour |
title_short | Employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour |
title_sort | employees’ healthy eating and physical activity: the role of colleague encouragement and behaviour |
topic | Research |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9628058/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36319982 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-14394-0 |
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