Arts Engagement and Mental Health at Work

In contexts outside of work, arts engagement has been named a “social glue”, with research showing that it promotes prosocial behavior (Van de Vyver & Abrams, 2018), perspective-taking (Day et al., 2002), and social bonding (Tarr et al., 2015; Weinstein et al., 2016). However, insights into arts engagement in organisations are very rare. Our project aims to bridge the divide between work and non-work domains and generate new knowledge regarding the role of arts engagement for working adults’ experience of loneliness at work, as a major risk to their mental health.

This Major Projects's guiding questions are:

• How does arts engagement increase social connectedness at work?
• How can organisations create an environment that allows for arts engagement?
• How can organisations be motivated to use arts engagement to prevent loneliness?
• How can working adults’ arts engagement be fostered inside and outside the organisation?

To address, the project will run a series of three knowledge-producing workshops that are both interdisciplinary (e.g., psychology, management, sociology, music, computer science, and law) and multi-professional (e.g., academia, industry, and charity) to generate research ideas, frameworks, and the agenda for further bigger grant applications to UKVI and The British Academy.

In its previous small IAS Small Project, the PIs identified both relational (e.g., social exclusion) and task-related (e.g., confidentiality) factors as driver for loneliness at work. This project will thus focus on working adults generally, with a particular focus on loneliness and mental health at work due to job-characteristics (e.g., high confidentiality required from senior managers), and due to person characteristics (e.g., marginalized identity of being a woman). The workshops will be omplemented with an empirical study. The study will employ a multidisciplinary methodology from psychology, management, music, and computer science to investigate how music engagement can reduce loneliness and enhance mental health at work. 

Workshop series

Each workshop has a focal theme with keynote speakers who will bring unique scholarly and practitioner expertise to stimulate a rich multi-professional and interdisciplinary discussion on arts engagement in organisations and its influence on employee mental health.  

• Theme 1: Arts engagement and mental health in organisations. This workshop aims to understand how arts engagement can be used in organisations to prevent and cope with loneliness, as well as enhance mental health. Example questions: How much place is for arts engagement in organisations? How receptive are organisations for arts engagement during working times? How can organisations support arts engagement for their employees? How much responsibility for arts do organisations have and why? 
• Theme 2: Arts engagement and lonely jobs. This workshop focuses on working adults in jobs that make them vulnerable to loneliness, such as jobs that demand high confidentiality (e.g., lawyer), responsibility (e.g., senior management), or take place outside of long-term employer-relationships (e.g., gig workers). Example questions: How can arts engagement help for jobs that make employees vulnerable to loneliness? In which ways can arts engagement inform belongingness in jobs that do not naturally support it? But also, what is the responsibility of managers in addressing loneliness at work? 
• Theme 3: Arts engagement and marginalised identities at work. Working adults with minorized identities (e.g., female gender, ethnic minorities, disabilities, chronic illness) will be the focus, as these are disproportionally affected by loneliness at work (British Red Cross, 2023). Example questions: How does arts engagement inform belongingness? How can arts engagement help to build bridges between minority and majority working adult groups? How can organisations use arts engagement to increase inclusiveness? 

Empirical study

For our empirical study, the focus will be on music listening as one form of arts engagement that is most easily accessible for working adults, and experimentally test its’ role for loneliness at work. Via cutting-edge machine learning methods, a gamification environment will be created that allows participants to interact with a range of music listening options. This will allow the PIs to identify the type of music events that are (a) preferred by lonely employees, and (b) most effective at alleviating the negative consequences of loneliness.

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Events and Activities: