WASHINGTON — New research that examines the psychological factors driving physical health and financial health was carried out with the help of employees at industrial laundries in several states, according to the Association for Psychological Science. Researcher Lamar Pierce, associate professor of strategy at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, and doctoral candidate Timothy Gubler published their study in Psychological Science, a journal of the association.
The study—titled Healthy, Wealthy & Wise: Retirement Planning Predicts Employee Health Improvements—found that the workers who contributed to a 401(k) retirement plan were more likely to address chronic health problems that were discovered in an employer-sponsored medical exam. The researchers followed industrial laundry employees for two years and compared the health of those who contributed to a retirement plan with those who chose not to.
Pierce says the study involved the entire range of job positions that can be found in an industrial laundry company, adding that researchers worked with a company that was “particularly progressive in their human resource policies, which provides interesting phenomena to study.”
The research showed that participants who saved for retirement improved their health significantly compared with those who did not save. The results suggest a high correlation between retirement savings and health improvement behaviors, according to the association.
“The biggest takeaway for firms is that there are a variety of different types of people within an organization, and that the incentives and information that one person will respond to are not necessarily the same as those that another will,” says Pierce, who points out that the study was not intended to focus solely on the laundry industry. “Firms need to consider a variety of policies to achieve goals—particularly when they involve long-term decision making—if they wish to reach all of their workers.”
The study is available here.
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