Well-Being as Having, Loving, Doing, and Being: An Integrative Organizing Framework for Employee Well-Being

Abstract

Employee well-being is one of the most studied outcomes in organizational research, operationalized variously as job satisfaction, affective well-being, work engagement, work meaningfulness, and eudaimonic well-being. What is lacking is a unified theoretical framework integrating various disparate research streams around separate well-being indicators. The present work offers such an organizing framework, building on self-determination theory and Erik Allardt's multidimensional theory of well-being. In particular, I distinguish functional well-being from perceived well-being, with the former consisting of three existential conditions associated with particular needs: Having focuses on feeling safe and getting the resources required for survival from work, loving focuses on getting one's interpersonal needs met at work, and doing focuses on getting one's agentic needs for autonomy and competence met at work. Perceived well-being (being) focuses on directly experiencing well-being at work, and I propose that it consists of evaluative, affective, and conative well-being, which largely result from having the three types of needs satisfied at work. I also propose a distinction between the fulfillment pathway to well-being and the frustration pathway to ill-being as two partially independent wellness processes. This integrative framework helps both scholars and practitioners make more informed choices about what dimensions of employee well-being to measure.