Social Support and Employee Mental Health: A Meta-Synthesis and Theoretical Framework

Abstract

Social support is widely promoted as a key organizational response to employee mental health challenges, yet management research has often overlooked how different sources of support—such as coworkers, line managers, senior leadership, and professional service providers—vary in their effects on employee recovery. This oversight is especially consequential for employees managing common, diagnosable mental health conditions for whom recovery depends on changes in maladaptive cognitive and behavioral processes that are frequently activated in work contexts. To address this limitation, we conducted an interdisciplinary meta-synthesis of 96 review articles spanning management, clinical psychology, psychiatry, and occupational health. Anchored in Beck and Haigh’s Generic Cognitive Model, we develop the Integrated Work Support Model (IWSM), which explains how distinct sources of social support influence activating work situations, maladaptive beliefs, and maladaptive behaviors over time for employees with common mental health conditions. Our synthesis distinguishes the roles of primary, secondary, and tertiary interventions, clarifying when organizational actors can mitigate triggering work conditions, when clinical expertise from professional service providers is required to directly change maladaptive processes, and how social support from actors internal to the organization can enhance—but not substitute for—therapeutic intervention. By integrating clinical theory with management scholarship, this review advances a process-based understanding of social support, specifies role-differentiated responsibilities for organizational actors and professional service providers, and offers actionable guidance for designing social support systems that promote recovery while avoiding unintended harm.