The Efficacy of the iWork.COMP Among Health Care Professionals: A Randomized Controlled Trial

1. Introduction Healthcare workers are in significant risk for the development of psychopathology, including depression, anxiety, psychological distress and burnout symptoms. According to the European Agency for Safety and Health Work (EU-OSHA; https://osha.europa.eu/en), there are several factors that may contribute to these mental health issues, such as excessive workload, conflicting demands and lack of role clarity, lack of involvement in making decisions that affect the worker, poorly managed organizational change, ineffective communication, and lack of support from management. These factors can be directly or indirectly related to leadership styles. Within leadership research, there has been an increasing interest in the study of toxic leadership, as a form of malicious leadership, in which leaders, through dysfunctional behaviour and/or deviant personality traits (psychopathic, Machiavelism, narcissistic), negatively impact on the mental health and wellbeing of the workforce. Despite its relevance, there is an absence of studies on the efficacy of intervention programs aimed at reducing the impact of toxic leadership styles in the workplace, namely among health care professionals.

Within psychotherapeutic interventions, there has been a growing empirical support for compassion-based interventions (e.g., Compassion-Focused Therapy; CFT), in a wide range of contexts. Recent studies have shown that CFT is considered an effective therapeutic approach for the rehabilitation of individuals with several psychopathological symptoms/disorders (e.g., anxiety, stress, burnout, and deviant personality traits) and for the establishment of healthy relationships with friends, family, and coworkers. In the workplace, CFT-based interventions have been shown to promote employees' wellbeing, through the reduction of stress and burnout symptoms and improvement of healthy and compassionate interpersonal relationships. Compassion can be conceptualized as a motivation to be sensitive to the suffering of one-self and others, allied with the wisdom and commitment to prevent and/or relieve it. It is linked with psychological well-being and has been found to be negatively associated with emotion dysregulation, shame and self-criticism. In the workplace, compassion has been linked with work commitment and work satisfaction. Moreover, compassion at work has been negatively associated with burnout symptoms. It is thus mandatory to develop and test cost-effectiveness CFT-based intervention programs able to mitigate the impact of toxic leadership styles in the workforce, promoting compassionate workplaces in health care systems. These mitigation programs can impact on an individual, team, and organizational levels. Promoting a compassionate motivation among health care professionals is crucial to their mental and physical health, to their wellbeing at work, and, consequently, to the delivery of safe, high-quality, and patient-centered care to the population. 2. Study Design This study will follow a Randomized Controlled Trial design (RCT; CONSORT-Statement) involving health care units from the Health Local Unity of Coimbra (HLU Coimbra; selected by the hospital's administration). The selected health care units will be randomly assigned to the Treatment Group (TG) and to the Waiting List Control Group WLCG). The randomization at the health care unit level (and not at an individual level) intends to maximize the intervention effects, as all participants will be receiving the intervention at the same time, potentially boosting and cumulating individual and team intervention effects.

Individuals who agree to participate in this RCT will sign an informed consent and will be asked to fulfil their socioeconomic data and a set of questionnaires (baseline assessment, M0). Participants will be assessed in three more assessment points (4-weeks intervals): middle of the intervention (M1), post treatment (M2) and 4-week follow-up (M3). All assessments (M0 to M3) will approximately take 10 minutes. 3. Participants Participants will be 200 emerging/pre-service (Gen-Z) and current health care workers (i.e., doctors and nurses working in the surgical pathway), aged over 18 years old and assuming both leader and non-leader roles in two (or more) similar Portuguese health care units. As the iWork.COMP program aims to be applied to all the workforce, no more restrictions are planned on age as well as on gender distribution.

Regarding the sample size, a power analysis was conducted a priori (GPower v3.1 software), specifying for F tests (multivariate analysis of variances: repeated measures, within-between interaction), showing that a sample of 162 participants was necessary to detect medium effects with a significance level of .05 and a power of .90. 4. Intervention The iWork.COMP is a short-term and low-time consuming internet delivery CFT-based intervention specifically designed to mitigate the impact of toxic leadership styles through the development of compassionate motivation in the workforce of EU hospitals. The iWork.COMP encompasses 8 individual sessions (20 minutes each; mixed format including text, audio and video presentations), which will be available weekly for participants at the KEEPCARING website (https://keepcaring.eu). Each session has three parts. Part 1 encompasses a brief check-in on the stress level of the participant at that moment and on the source of their stress (if applicable). In Part 2, the theme of the session is developed. Finally, Part 3 encompasses a brief check-in on the stress level of the participant at the end of the session and on the usefulness of the session; an optional open question to provide feedback will also be displayed.

At the end of the iWork.COMP, participants will have full access to a SOS-Button tool, which aims to provide short-term exercises when one is dealing with an acute stressful situation. 5. Measures During the four assessment moments, both TG and WLCG participants will answer a set of questionnaires already validated for the Portuguese population, aimed at measuring toxic leadership styles (Toxic Leadership Scale; TLS); deviant personality traits (Dirty Dozen; DD); burnout (Burnout Assessment Tool; BAT-12); wellbeing (Daniels's Five-Factor Measure; D-FAW), and compassion (Fears of Compassion Scales; FCS). A detailed description of these questionnaires will be presented in the outcome measures section. 6. Data analysis The data will be analyzed with SPSS v29 and Mplus v8 statistical software. Preliminary analyses, namely for comparisons between groups at baseline on sociodemographic data and outcome measures, will resort to independent-samples t-tests and chi-square tests. Internal consistency calculations will be based on Cronbach's alpha guidelines. To test the efficacy of the iWork.COMP, data will be analyzed both at an individual (Reliable Change Index) and group level (Latent Growth Curve Models). If Latent Growth Curve models don't present acceptable fit indices, treatment effects will be assessed through MANOVAs. 7. Ethical Considerations To address any ethical considerations, a series of procedures will be carried out.