[A study of the psychosocial characteristics of psychiatric teams in Hungary].

Background: In this study, we examined psychiatric teams in a Hungarian sample before the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of our research is to examine Hungarian psychiatric teams along different workplace psychosocial factors (collaboration management, organization and job, workplace requirements, work-life balance, trust, health and well-being) in order to assess them in terms of hierarchy and competence. Moreover we examine the mental and somatic effects of these factors.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional survey of Hungarian mental health care workers (N =79). The main question of the study was how perceived hierarchy and competence boundary violations are associated to psychosocial factors of the COPSOQ-II questionnaire (Copenhagen Psychosocial Questionnaire II) in general, and among employees in different job groups.

Results: Based on bootstrapped binary logistic regression performed on the full sample, we found that perceived hierarchy is associated with control, social support of co-workers and stress, while violation of competence boundaries is associated with job recognition, job clarity and fairness.

Discussion: Our results show that where mental health care workers experienced less perceived hierarchy within the team, they were more likely to feel that they had control over their work. Furthermore, in hierarchies perceived as superior-subordinate relations, the quality of the relationships within the team seems to be much more important.

Conclusions: This research can be the starting point for a comprehensive study of other psychiatric teams with the aid of a widely used measure, providing an opportunity for comparison with other health teams at an international level.