Smoke-Free Workplace Policies and Organizational Attraction

Abstract

Companies adopt smoke-free workplace policies to improve health of their employees, but how severely such policies are enforced can have an impact on non-smoking employees as well and can also affect employees' view about their companies. The current study examined the extent to which perceived severity of and organizational support for a smoke-free workplace policy affected employees' attraction toward their organizations. The data from 621 employees of 20 companies in the U.S. and 27 companies in Korea showed that the extent to which employees considered a smoke-free policy at their workplace to be enforced severely was negatively related to organizational attraction (coefficient = -0.22, p = .002) and perceived organizational support was positively related to organizational attraction (coefficient = 0.41, p< .001). The negative relationship between perceived Global Journal of Health Science Vol. 2, No. 1; April 2010 97 severity and organizational attraction, however, became weaker for organizations that had employees with higher perceptions of organizational support. In contrast to smokers (coefficient = -.05), ex-smokers' perceived severity of a smoke-free policy was positively related to their organizational attraction (coefficient = .31). These findings indicated that a smoke-free policy in the workplace can have implications for non-smokers, including ex-smokers, as well as for smokers.