• Whitney Berta, Audrey Laporte, Tyrone Perreira, Liane Ginsburg, Adrian Rohit Dass, Raisa Deber, Andrea Baumann, Lisa Cranley, Ivy Bourgeault, Janet Lum, Brenda Gamble, Kathryn Pilkington, Vinita Haroun, and Paula Neves.
• Institute for Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, University of Toronto, 155 College Street, 4th Floor, Toronto, ON, M5T 3M6, Canada. whit.berta@utoronto.ca.
• Hum Resour Health. 2018 Mar 22; 16 (1): 15.

BackgroundOur overarching study objective is to further our understanding of the work psychology of Health Support Workers (HSWs) in long-term care and home and community care settings in Ontario, Canada. Specifically, we seek novel insights about the relationships among aspects of these workers' work environments, their work attitudes, and work outcomes in the interests of informing the development of human resource programs to enhance elder care.MethodsWe conducted a path analysis of data collected via a survey administered to a convenience sample of Ontario HSWs engaged in the delivery of elder care over July-August 2015.ResultsHSWs' work outcomes, including intent to stay, organizational citizenship behaviors, and performance, are directly and significantly related to their work attitudes, including job satisfaction, work engagement, and affective organizational commitment. These in turn are related to how HSWs perceive their work environments including their quality of work life (QWL), their perceptions of supervisor support, and their perceptions of workplace safety.ConclusionsHSWs' work environments are within the power of managers to modify. Our analysis suggests that QWL, perceptions of supervisor support, and perceptions of workplace safety present particularly promising means by which to influence HSWs' work attitudes and work outcomes. Furthermore, even modest changes to some aspects of the work environment stand to precipitate a cascade of positive effects on work outcomes through work attitudes.

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