Well-being and Performance at Work

The role of context

Marc van Veldhoven, Riccardo Peccei, Marc van Veldhoven, Riccardo Peccei

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317588788
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology has been interested in the well-being and performance of people at work for over a century, but our knowledge about both issues, and how they relate to each other, is still evolving. This important new collection provides new understandings on what it means to work productively while also feeling happy, socially related and healthy.

Including contributions from a range of international experts, the book begins with a conceptual framework for understanding both concepts, before showing how a variety of different contexts, both organizational and personal, impact upon well-being and performance. The book includes chapters on specific job roles, from creative work to service positions, as well as the importance of HR policies and how the individual worker can determine their own well-being and performance.

Also featuring a chapter on researching this fascinating area, Well-being and Performance at Work will be essential reading for all students and researchers of organizational or occupational psychology, HRM and business and management. It is also hugely relevant for any professionals interested in the productivity and well-being of their organizations.

Contextualizing Individual Well-being and Performance at Work Setting the scene

Marc van Veldhoven and Riccardo Peccei

DOI: 10.4324/9781315743325-1

Individual well-being and performance at work are classic topics within work and organizational psychology, and indeed within the whole of psychology as an academic discipline (Münsterberg, 1913). Although psychological research on these topics has been going on for over a century now (Peeters, De Jonge & Taris, 2014), the field is still actively developing and it is important to take stock from time to time of important progress. In the area of individual well-being and performance progress in recent decades has been triggered by a number of developments:

1. There has been a growing recognition of the multidimensionality of the constructs involved. Neither well-being nor performance at work can be described by a singular dimension. This is clear from important reviews of the area that have been published in leading journals and books (see for example Grant, Christianson & Price, 2007, for well-being and Campbell, 1990, for performance).
2. Psychology has moved away from a narrow focus on negative feelings, thoughts and behaviors. The rise of positive psychology has generated a more balanced account of well-being and performance at work, with much more knowledge now also accumulating about positive well-being and performance constructs (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000; Luthans, 2002; Bakker & Daniels, 2013).
3. Several specific job settings have generated specific bodies of knowledge about the factors involved in individual well-being and performance at work that have developed into niche literatures in their own right. In a field that has until quite recently been dominated by general job characteristics and work process models (Parker, Wall & Cordery, 2001) this has been a major development. Researchers have systematically begun to study specific job settings such as, for example, dirty work (Ashforth & Kreiner, 1999), emotion work (Grandey, 2000) and creative work (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996).
4. The area of (Strategic) Human Resource Management has – over the past 25 years – transformed the way organizations are dealing with employees in order to achieve organizational performance, and is by now accumulating a research base of its own that is directly interfacing with work and organizational psychology (Boxall & Purcell, 2011; Paauwe, Guest & Wright, 2013; Peccei, van de Voorde & van Veldhoven, 2013).
5. Multilevel research has enabled researchers to start investigating empirically the linkages between organizational and societal phenomena, on the one hand, and employee level phenomena on the other. Such research is providing new insights into old issues, and has generated several new topics of its own that are linked to the multilevel complexity of the processes involved (Klein & Kozlowski, 2000).
6. Finally, whereas in classic approaches to job design, HRM, leadership, working conditions and employment relations, the worker is typically described as a passive recipient of societal, organizational and managerial initiatives, recent work is emphasizing more and more the active role played by workers in shaping their job, their career, their employment relations and their working conditions, as well as in shaping themselves as workers (Frese & Fay, 2001; Grant & Parker, 2009).

All in all, these developments imply that within the field of work and organizational psychology the study of individual well-being and performance is indeed a highly dynamic research area. Given this, and given the lack of systematic, current research-oriented overviews of the area, this would seem to be a particularly good moment to take stock of the situation and consider what progress has recently been made in the study of the psychology of well-being and performance at work. The Current Issues in Work and Organizational Psychology series, of which this volume is a part, provides an excellent opportunity to do so.

This book volume will start with a state-of-the-art overview of key concepts and theories involved in the analysis of individual well-being and performance (Chapter 2). However, the main emphasis will be on putting individual well-being and performance at work more explicitly in context (Chapters 3 to 8). We start, in this introductory chapter, with some preliminaries about the terminology used in the book. Next, we present a contextual model of work, well-being and performance that served as a framework for organizing the book. We conclude the chapter with a brief overview of each of the chapters in the book.

Terminology

The main terms used in this book require some basic definitions before we can start. This is by no means a trivial issue, as Chapter 2 in this volume by Taris and Schaufeli will show. There is no consensus in the field as to the exact definitions of the basic terms ‘well-being’ and ‘performance’, for example. Rather, there are a variety of different approaches, each associated with a developing research base in its own right.

For practical purposes it may suffice, at this stage, to suggest that, in a narrow sense, well-being at work refers to an individual’s affective state on the job (Diener, Suh, Lucas & Smith, 1999). The core of this affective state relates to feelings of happiness, health and the quality of social relationships (Grant et al., 2007). In recent years, however, this ‘narrow’ core has been expanded in several ways (Taris and Schaufeli, Chapter 2 in this volume), thus broadening the well-being concept considerably to include, in particular, more behavioral and motivational components.

In terms of work performance, there is also no general consensus amongst researchers about how this term should be defined. Rather, there is a series of common uses of the notion of work performance in the extant literature. The most important point to note here is the distinction between the results of work versus the process of work (Sonnentag & Frese, 2002). As an example: one may consider the act of writing a text as job performance (process) or alternatively one may use the term job performance to refer to the text itself (result). Both uses of the term are common in the literature and will be used in this book.

This leads to the third term we would like to introduce here, namely the notion of context. As this concerns the overall theme of the book, the next section goes into greater detail. The Oxford dictionary defines ‘context’ as the “circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood” (Stevenson, 2010). Paraphrasing this dictionary definition we might say that when we use the term ‘context’ in relation to individual well-being and performance at work, this addresses “all the circumstances that form the setting for individual well-being and performance at work, and in terms of which these two constructs and their relationship can be fully understood”. In the next section we elaborate this further.

The context of well-being and performance at work

As Okhuysen et al. (2013) have argued, there are many possible lenses through which work can be examined, each of which may have different implications for the notion of context. Indeed, different authors have proposed different ways of conceptualizing ‘context’ in work-related research. For earlier contributions on contextualizing research in work and organizational psychology/organizational behavior see, for example, the work of Blair and Hunt (1986), Capelli and Sherer (1991), Mowday and Sutton (1993), Johns (2001, 2006), Rousseau and Fried (2001), Hackman (2003) and Van Breukelen (2012). Here, we will take an action-oriented view of context. This, it should be recognized, is but one way of thinking about context. It is an approach, however, that we believe will help us to specify better how context is relevant to individual well-being and performance at work, and to organize our book accordingly.

Work is a “set of coordinated and goal-directed activities that are conducted in exchange for something else” (Peeters, De Jonge & Taris, 2014, p. 4). An action-oriented view puts these “work activities” at the center of the analysis. The coordinated (i.e. non-random) actions of a worker are core to the definition of work as presented above, and these actions are always in context. It is in the context that the goals of the activities lie, as well as the “something else” that is exchanged for work. The starting point taken here is rooted in a research tradition that originated in mainland Europe and that is commonly referred to as action theory (Frese & Zapf, 1994; Meijman & Mulder, 1998; Hacker, 2003). Seen from this perspective, the term context covers a rather wide range of factors that need to be taken into consideration if one wants to understand work actions. Based on this starting point, we propose that it is helpful to distinguish between several types of contextual factors. We believe this distinction will help in understanding how context plays a role in the analysis of individual well-being and performance at work. Figure 1.1 presents a model of the role of context in individual well-being and performance at work. Below we elaborate on each of the components of figure 1.1 in turn.

Figure 1.1 A contextual model of individual work, well-being and performance

At the center of the model we find work actions. Some authors, it is worth noting, commonly refer to this as job performance. This includes the proficient performance of core job tasks, as well as wider contributions to the work setting, such as organizational citizenship behaviors (Campbell, 1990; Organ, et al., 2006). In action theory it is common not to emphasize the different target behaviors of employees, but instead to emphasize the multiple types of regulation involved in keeping work actions targeted towards work-related goals (Frese & Zapf, 1994; Hacker, 2003). Now let us turn to context.

First, there is the immediate work context. This concerns all the situational elements that are necessary for and/or a direct part of the work activities under analysis. Such elements can be physical (goods, machines, locations, tools), social (clients, co-workers) or intangible (scripts, work orders). Meijman and Mulder (1998) and other authors focusing on the energy resources required to perform and regulate

work activities (for example Hockey, 1997), describe work as the strategic behavior of employees combining all these situational inputs into work actions in order to achieve performance, at the cost of the expenditure of work-related effort. What is important here is that all the situational elements mentioned above need to fit together with worker characteristics, given the “goals” and “coordinated activities” that are involved in work actions. Immediate work contexts vary enormously between jobs. The immediate work context of a garbage collector is hardly comparable to that of a software developer, which is again completely different from that of a psychotherapist.

The regulation of work actions is not limited to inputs from the situation. Indeed, important inputs to work action regulation are internal to the worker; they constitute the “individual at work”. When confronted with the demands of current work actions aimed at achieving a specific work goal, the actual level of knowledge, abilities and skills of the worker, as well as his/her immediate emotional, cognitive and energetic state are also important inputs to the work action regulation process (Frese & Zapf, 1994; Meijman & Mulder, 1998). It is exactly here that individual work actions become very strategic indeed: how to achieve work goals given current demands, constraints, knowledge and internal states. This also implies that work action is not static: workers choose different work strategies not only depending on differences in situational demands and constraints, but also depending on personal, internal fluctuation in the variables mentioned (Hockey, 1997). As an example: maybe a worker is well-trained for a certain task, yet is so tired by the end of a shift that maintaining appropriate goal-directed work action (job performance as action) is impossible.

One of the most important developments in recent work psychology has been to demonstrate that work is not stable from one task to the next, from one day to the next, from one client to the next (Bakker & Daniels, 2013). Indeed, there is a large amount of intra-individual variation in work, well-being and performance. Diary studies, in particular, are capturing this new area of investigation in work psychology more and more clearly (Ohly, Sonnentag, Niessen & Zapf, 2010). What we learn from these diary studies is that the ‘individual at work’ is fluctuating, and indeed work is always dynamic and momentous.

Now that we have introduced the more immediate setting, we can move to the wider circumstances influencing work actions. A second type of context is the distal work context. This refers to the organizational and societal environment in which work takes place. These factors impact on work in a more indirect way. They are more remote, setting the stage for or shaping the immediate work context, but they are not actually a constituent part of the immediate work context as such, or directly impinge on work action itself (i.e. regulation). To illustrate this point, think of the effect of a supervisor on work. If the supervisor herself is not present during the actual execution of the work, she is not as much a part of the immediate work context as of the distal work context. However, all work instructions and expectations that she has communicated to the workers in her department are part of the immediate work context for the employees under her supervision.

There are many elements to the distal work context. A first element is the macro-societal level. All work is to an important extent influenced by legislation and institutions operating at regional, national and internation...