Relation of Supervisor Social Control to Employee Substance Use: Considering the Dimensionality of Social Control, Temporal Context of Substance Use, and Substance Legality

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Objective: Research on supervisor social control provided little evidence for a relation to employee alcohol use, and only one study explored illicit drug use. Based on past research, several hypotheses were developed that the relation between supervisor social control and substance use depends on (a) the dimension social control (contact vs. enforcement), (b) the temporal context of substance use (on the job vs. off the job), and (c) substance legality (alcohol vs. illicit drugs). Method: Data came from a national probability sample of U.S. workers. Supervisor social control represented both supervisor contact and supervisor enforcement. Measures of alcohol and illicit drug use each assessed several dimensions of off-the-job use (overall use, overall impairment, and use after work) and on-the-job use (use before work, use during the workday, and impairment during the workday). Results: As hypothesized, the results did not support a relation of supervisor contact to off-the-job or on-the-job alcohol use and illicit drug use. Supervisor enforcement was unrelated to off-the-job alcohol use but was negatively related to on-the-job alcohol use. Supervisor enforcement was negatively related to both off-the-job and on-the-job illicit drug use. Conclusions: These fi ndings help clarify the generally unsupportive fi ndings from past research for a relation between supervisor social control and employee alcohol use, as well as extend this line of research to include illicit drug use. The results suggest that to fully understand the relation of supervisor social control to employee substance use, one must consider the dimension of supervisor social control, temporal context of substance use, and substance legality. (J. Stud. Alcohol Drugs, 73, 303-310, 2012)

Work stress and alcohol use: developing and testing a biphasic self-medication model

“…However, only work fatigue conditionally mediated the relation of work stressor exposure to workday alcohol use and only negative affect conditionally mediated the relation of work stressor exposure to after work alcohol use. These differential effects support prior research showing that other workplace predictors, such as supervisor social control (Frone & Trinidad, 2012) and workplace alcohol use norms (Frone & Brown, 2010) show differential relations across alcohol use outcomes. Even if differential relations are not expected or observed, using a broad set of alcohol outcomes provides evidence that a given feature of the workplace has a consistent impact on employee alcohol use.…”

The great recession and employee alcohol use: A U.S. population study.

“…To the extent that work demands increased among those who retained employment and the available labor force increased with downsizing, employers may have been more likely to monitor employee work behavior and employees may have been more sensitive to this possibility leading to elevated levels of job insecurity. Also, because alcohol use is legal, employer substance use policies generally proscribe alcohol use during the workday, but do not address alcohol use outside work, such as after-work use (Frone & Trinidad, 2012). Therefore, based on these arguments and self-medication models of stress-induced alcohol use, it is hypothesized that the Great Recession will be associated with a decrease in alcohol use during the workday to avoid job loss and an increase in alcohol use after work to reduce stress.…”

Driven to the Bottle

“…In contrast, findings with regard to the impact of supervisor contact and monitoring/enforcement are equivocal with protective (i.e., negative) effects found in some studies (e.g., Ames et al, 2000;Frone & Trinidad, 2012) and null effects found in others (Bacharach et al, 2002;Macdonald, Wells, & Wild, 1999). For example, Frone and Trinidad (2012) found supervisory enforcement to be negatively associated with employee alcohol consumption at work, and Ames et al (2000) found ethnographic evidence that employee perceptions of their supervisor's willingness and ability to intervene in suspected cases of employee alcohol impairment at work was negatively associated with problem drinking. In contrast, when controlling for other risk factors, Bacharach et al (2002) found supervisory willingness and ability to intervene to have no significant link with employee problem drinking.…”