The team, led by Martha Isabel Riaño-Casallas of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, together with Francisco Palencia-Sánchez of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and colleagues including Caroline T. Reppold and Alberto A. Rasia-Filho at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre and the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, frames workplace well-being as a critical determinant of both global public health and organizational productivity. Their review, published open access on 2 October 2026, does not report new experimental data. Instead, it synthesizes existing evidence into a conceptual architecture designed to guide policymakers, managers, occupational health professionals, and workers themselves toward multi-level interventions that could prevent workplace-related mental disorders, accidents, and avoidable mortality.

The problem the framework addresses is well documented but stubbornly resistant to solution. Despite decades of research into psychosocial risks and mental health at work, the authors note that presenteeism—the practice of showing up to work while ill and functioning below capacity—continues to rise, alongside burnout and the growing burden of chronic non-communicable diseases. These conditions impose costs that ripple far beyond the individual. Reduced productivity, elevated healthcare expenditure, increased absenteeism, and premature mortality all trace back, in part, to working conditions that damage health over time. Yet most interventions remain fragmented: human resources departments deploy one set of tools, occupational physicians another, and wellness programs a third, with little coordination or shared scientific grounding.

The proposed framework rests on four pillars, each contributing a distinct layer of analysis. The first is organizational management, which supplies the practical levers through which workplaces are actually designed and run. Management research addresses how decisions are made, how work is structured, and how organizations can be steered toward healthier configurations. The second pillar, global occupational health, brings a population-level and preventive perspective. According to the authors, this discipline supports the systematic assessment of workers’ capacities and vulnerabilities, the early identification of psychosocial risks, and the prevention of chronic non-communicable diseases across diverse working populations—a scope that becomes essential when interventions must function across different economies, cultures, and regulatory environments.

The third and perhaps most distinctive pillar is neuroscience. Here the review draws on basic and applied research into the neural mechanisms underlying human emotion and cognition. The authors point to evidence clarifying the neural circuits that underpin feelings, motivation, and stress responses, as well as the biological basis of interindividual variability in how people cope with stress and job demands. This is where the framework makes its most technically ambitious move: by grounding workplace interventions in an understanding of how the brain actually responds to occupational stressors, the authors aim to move the field beyond generic wellness slogans toward strategies that respect the biology of the people they are meant to protect.

The neuroscience component matters because stress at work is not an abstract construct. Chronic activation of stress-response systems, repeated exposure to perceived threat or lack of control, and sustained cognitive load all engage neural circuits that influence mood, motivation, decision-making, and long-term physical health. Individual differences in these circuits help explain why two workers exposed to identical conditions may fare very differently—one thriving under pressure while the other develops exhaustion or illness. A framework that incorporates this variability, the authors argue, can move occupational health from a one-size-fits-all model toward assessments that account for each worker’s capacities and vulnerabilities, enabling earlier and more precise identification of those at risk.

The fourth pillar, positive psychology, supplies the intervention repertoire. The review highlights non-pharmacological strategies—mindfulness training, strengths-based approaches, and gratitude or meaning-centered interventions—that research suggests may reduce distress and enhance resilience. Crucially, the authors attach a condition: these techniques must be implemented according to scientific and ethical standards. This caveat reflects a growing concern in the field that workplace wellness programs are often rolled out with little evidence of effectiveness, sometimes shifting responsibility for structural problems onto individual workers. By insisting on scientific rigor, the framework attempts to separate evidence-informed practice from wellness theater.

What emerges from the integration of these four domains is a multi-level model in which each discipline compensates for the blind spots of the others. Management science knows how to change organizations but historically has lacked a biological account of why those changes matter. Occupational health can identify risks at scale but often struggles to translate findings into daily managerial practice. Neuroscience explains mechanisms but rarely speaks the language of policy or administration. Positive psychology offers practical tools but needs the guardrails of ethics and evidence that the other disciplines provide. The framework’s promise lies in the connections: a manager informed by neuroscience understands why autonomy and workload boundaries affect health; an occupational physician equipped with management insight can push for structural reforms rather than individual fixes; and positive psychology interventions can be targeted to the workers most likely to benefit, based on systematic assessment of their capacities and vulnerabilities.

The authors argue that such an interdisciplinary approach offers a pathway to protect and promote workers’ well-being by designing evidence-informed strategies aimed at preventing workplace-related mental disorders, accidents, and avoidable mortality. The beneficiaries, they contend, are not only individual workers but organizations and the common good more broadly, since healthier workforces underpin healthier economies and societies. The framework is explicitly theoretical at this stage—it is a proposal for how the fields should connect, not a demonstration that the integrated model has been tested in practice. As a review, it lays out a conceptual map and invites empirical validation, implementation research, and adaptation to specific occupational settings.

Still, the timing of the proposal is significant. Labor markets worldwide are contending with post-pandemic shifts in work arrangements, rising reports of exhaustion and disengagement, and an accelerating burden of chronic disease linked partly to occupational and lifestyle factors. The World Health Organization and the International Labour Organization have both emphasized mental health at work as a global priority, and governments are increasingly legislating on psychosocial risk. Against this backdrop, a framework that gives policymakers, stakeholders, managers, occupational health professionals, and workers a shared scientific vocabulary—spanning neural circuits and organizational design—represents an ambitious attempt to make workplace well-being a rigorously engineered outcome rather than an aspirational slogan. Whether the model can survive contact with real workplaces, with their competing incentives and resource constraints, will be the next test. But the paper makes a compelling case that the era of treating the mind, the organization, and the body as separate problems at work may finally be coming to an end.

Subject of Research: An interdisciplinary framework integrating management, occupational health, neuroscience, and positive psychology to improve workplace well-being

Article Title: An interdisciplinary framework integrating management, global occupational health, and neuroscience for workplace well-being

Article References: Riaño-Casallas, M. I., Palencia-Sánchez, F., Stein, A. T., Lyra Batista, J. D., Reppold, C. T., & Rasia-Filho, A. A. (2026). An interdisciplinary framework integrating management, global occupational health, and neuroscience for workplace well-being. Discover Mental Health. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44192-026-00579-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44192-026-00579-1

Keywords: workplace well-being, occupational health, neuroscience, burnout, presenteeism, positive psychology, psychosocial risks, non-communicable diseases, organizational management, mental health, stress response, resilience