“Happiness, Health, or Relationships? Managerial Practices and Employee Well-Being Tradeoffs”
Academy of Management Perspectives
August 2007, pp. 51-63
The authors of this article state that employee well-being is a “hot topic” in organizational life. Employee well-being can be defined as “the overall quality of an employee’s experience and functioning at work.” There are three key dimensions of well-being:
- Psychological well-being or happiness—In the work setting, this has been looked at as “job satisfaction” by some researchers and as “fulfillment and the realization of human potential” by others.
- Physical well-being or health—In the work setting, this has been looked at as level of injury/disease, or Stress, or healthcare service benefits.
- Social well-being—In the work setting, researchers have looked at such factors as trust, social support, reciprocity, leader-member exchange, cooperation, coordination, and integration.
The article provides several examples of how specific efforts to promote well-being on one of the above three key dimensions may create a trade-off with diminished satisfaction with one of the other dimensions.
In order to achieve positive well-being synergies, the authors suggest that organizations have two options:
- Influencing managerial attention by encouraging managers to notice the impact of their actions on employee well-being
- Influencing managerial motivations by encouraging managers to value the impact of their actions on employee well-being
Ways to increase managerial attention include:
- Think broadly about who is affected and how
- Think about long-term impact
- Collect more information on employees’ attitudes about current practices
Ways to increase managerial motivation include:
- Broaden the range of outcomes important in the organization
- Be willing to reconsider practices
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