Wellbeing for Sustainability in the Global Workplace

Paola Ochoa, Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Peter Essens, Paola Ochoa, Maria-Teresa Lepeley, Peter Essens

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429893988
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Wellbeing in the workplace is an essential element in fostering a worker's sense of being valued, ensuring their engagement, and ultimately leading to higher levels of productivity and organizational performance. This important book specifically adds to the discussion by taking a global perspective, and evaluates wellbeing in the workplace in different countries, identifying both universal issues and specific cultural issues.

Chapter authors have been drawn from across five continents and eleven countries to provide ground-breaking research in wellbeing from different regional perspectives, looking at both developed and developing world scenarios. What is clear throughout the book is that organizations that are not people-centered undermine their capacity to attain and maintain quality standards, high performance, and competitiveness.

Organizational concerns about workers' wellbeing are growing exponentially due to the global VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) environment. In this environment, organizational success is no longer simply based on short-term revenue maximization, capital investments, or sales, but increasingly depends on people's wellbeing, human capital, and the development of human talent to ensure sustained and sustainable growth and performance. This book presents a collection of studies that address current and forthcoming organizational challenges and offer realistic solutions to support leaders and managers seeking to balance and value the contribution of people with long-term organizational performance.

Part I
Understanding wellbeing

1
Psychosocial wellbeing at work

Reasons to invest in healthy employees and workplaces

Paola Ochoa and Josep M. Blanch

Introduction

Throughout the twentieth century, the psychology of work focused its research and intervention in the analysis and prevention of labor malaise. In contrast, the psychology of the organization did not have that negativist bias. In general, however, organizational studies focused on wellbeing and job satisfaction as something associated with and subordinate to some processes that were considered more central, such as performance, productivity, efficiency, quality, competitiveness, culture, climate, and development.

From the twenty-first century, driven by the current of Positive Psychology, research on work and organizational processes has analyzed the optimal functioning of people and teams within organizations, the development of healthy workplaces and organizations, and the reciprocal influence between organizational dynamics and staff wellbeing. In this respect, numerous studies provide growing evidence that work wellbeing generates positive impacts on organizational outcomes such as job performance, competitiveness, quality standards, and sustainability (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008; Bakker et al., 2008; Bakker & Leiter, 2010; Clark & Senik, 2014; De Neve et al., 2013; EU-OSHA, 2014; Grawitch & Ballard, 2016; Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007; Luthans, Youssef, & Avolio, 2007; Rodríguez-Carvajal, Moreno-Jiménez, Rivas-Hermosilla, Álvarez-Bejarano, & Sanz Vergel, 2010; Schulte & Vainio, 2010; WHO, 2010, 2017; Youssef & Luthans, 2010). From these findings are derived some requirements concerning human talent management, the prevention of psychosocial risks, promotion of happiness at work, and improvement of healthy work environments.

In this context, it makes sense to ask what conceptions of wellbeing at work are handled by the literature and how the financial and psychosocial aspects of work wellbeing are articulated in such constructs. According to the interdisciplinary consensus, the relationship between financial and psychosocial work wellbeing does not follow a linear model. Once basic needs are satisfied, increases in wellbeing appear linked not to financial but to psychosocial factors associated with personal development, quality of working life, occupational health, and opportunities for experiencing positive self-referential cognitions and emotions (Bakker & Leiter, 2010; Granero, Blanch, & Ochoa, 2017; Luthans, Avolio, Avey, & Norman, 2007).

The aim of this chapter is to integrate interdisciplinary constructions on work wellbeing, focusing on its positive consequences for employees, organizations, and society.

Working, living, and wellbeing

Work is a way of relating to things we produce and use and to people with whom we interact, collaborating or exchanging goods, products, or services. Omnipresent throughout history and across cultures, it consumes all kinds of energies, thoughts, emotions, efforts, and times in the lives of most people in all societies. The quality of our lives is marked by our experience of work as a source of wellbeing but also malaise, blessings and curses, emancipation and alienation, and success and failure, of healthy effects and pathological consequences. Each society configures a predominant vision of work, referring to rights and responsibilities, prescriptions and proscriptions, imperatives and taboos.

For most people, work is the principal way to obtain earnings necessary for personal survival and that of their families and communities. This instrumental function has made it a powerful motivational factor. However, scientific literature of the last century has provided empirical evidence that labor activity constitutes not only a means of earning money by way of salary but also a standard way of developing subjectivity at personal, social, and cultural levels. For this reason, formal employment consumes a large proportion of the daily life of people and families in cities and nations, functioning as basic support for social order and integration and a determinant of physical and mental health, wellbeing, and quality of life. From most diverse disciplines, work is considered a human activity that transcends the simple instinctive response to the biological imperative of material survival, making it unique for its reflexive, conscious, propositional, strategic, instrumental, social, and moral nature. According to this perspective (Blanch, 2012), the work environment contributes to the development of psychological experiences of positive signs, such as health and wellbeing, satisfaction and happiness, certainty and safety, achievement and realization, recognition and identity, and self-referential cognitions and emotions such as autonomy, self-expression, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. On the other hand, work can generate negative emotions such as discomfort, anxiety, distress, depression, emotional exhaustion, feelings of ineffectiveness, frustration, hopelessness, and helplessness.

The work–wellbeing relationship can be described as the chronicle of a fundamental ambivalence; work wellbeing refers to the rewarding and successful experience of doing, with effort and purpose, something economically, socially, and personally productive. However, it also refers to the experience of discomfort associated with work risk, failure, or frustration.

The literature provides evidence that the degree of physical, psychological, and social wellbeing work provides to working people depends on two factors: working conditions and subjective conceptions of work that dominate in time and place (Ardichvili & Kuchinke, 2009; Granero et al., 2017; Ochoa & Blanch, 2016). Working conditions are a set of ecological, material, technical, economic, social, political, legal, and organizational circumstances and characteristics within which labor activity and relationships are developed. This context has a direct impact on the quality of work, on health and safety, motivation and commitment, satisfaction and discomfort, work performance, and occupational pathologies. It also has decisive influence on the dynamics of organizations in two senses: positively, on productivity and competitiveness, efficiency and effectiveness, excellence and sustainability; and negatively, on conflict, absenteeism and presentism, turnover, desertion of the job or profession, accidents, or occupational diseases (Blanch, Sahagún & Cervantes, 2010). Conceptions of work derive from historical and cultural backgrounds of working practice. They express the way each society understands, interprets, values, and constructs through language and common sense its particular vision of the working experience. In this respect, throughout history and cultures, work has been experienced and narrated as a factor of wellbeing and as a source of discontent. Each culture shapes a dominant version of what work entails as blessing or curse, of healthy experience or pathology.

Then, why do people work? Sustenance or accomplishment

Are we working for immediate salary rewards or to fulfill a job mission in life? What motivates us more to work? What we can do or buy with money obtained from employment; the personal, professional, social, or family goals attained from work; or all these reasons at the same time? If the latter, how do workers rank these motives and values? What can explain that, in recent decades, a majority of people across continents and cultures, genres and generations, state preference to continue working even if they should win a lottery that would solve all economic needs for the rest of their lives?

Ryan and Deci (2001) asked the question, To be happy or to be self-fulfilled, and Huta and Ryan (2010) wondered whether people are Pursuing pleasure or virtue. Both statements reflect the current situation in a debate that goes throughout Western history. One of the first axes of philosophical discussion on the nature of happiness and its paths goes back to Greek classics in the fourth century BC, establishing tensions between eudemonist and hedonist views. Epicurus of Samos represents the hedonistic approach, defending the human capacity to choose, in a free, rational, and prudent way, a vital pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain while at the same time avoiding the extremes of renunciation and self-indulgence. Epicureanism affirmed the superiority of the pleasures of the soul (deep and durable) over those of the body (superficial and ephemeral). In contrast, according to Aristotle as the representative of eudemonism, all human action points to an end, and the ultimate goal of ethics is happiness. This final state must be sought with rationality, more strictly related to virtue than to pleasure.

Both traditions point to happiness as the ideal sta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• About the editors
• List of contributing authors
• Preface
• PART I Understanding wellbeing
• PART II Wellbeing and work
• PART III Emerging forms of wellbeing
• Index