Supporting Employees with Chronic Pain: A Pain-focused Transformational Leadership Intervention

Past research has identified the role of effective leadership in reducing chronic pain and pain disability in the workplace. However, many leaders are ill equipped to support their employees with chronic pain due to lack of the necessary knowledge and skills on the topic. The objective of this study was to develop and evaluate a training intervention to enhance organizational leaders’ attitudes and behaviors towards chronic pain in the workplace. The evaluation of the online, hour-long training program focusing on pain-specific transformational leadership, using pre-, post-, and follow-up measurements in both training and control groups (NTraining = 92, NControl = 84), showed that the program was effective in reducing affective stigma towards employees with chronic pain as well as pain-specific leadership efficacy and self-reported pain-focused transformational leadership behaviors in the training group, while no significant changes were observed in the control group. However, these improvements in leaders’ outcomes did not result in better performance among employees with chronic pain in either of these groups. Overall, this study shows that newly developed pain-focused transformational leadership program could be a promising tool in preventing and managing chronic pain in the workplace by improving leaders’ attitudes and efficacy, and pain-focused transformational behaviors.