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20 Well-Being and the Workplace Peter Warr Paid employment has a substantial impact on the well-being of most adults. This chapter examines the nature ofemployee well-being and the key features of jobs and people that affect well-being. The proposed framework distinguishes between feelings that are context-specific (Jor instance, satisfaction with one's job) and those that are contextfree (Jor example, life satisfaction). Three principal axes for the measurement ofboth forms of well-being are described, ranging from displeasure to pleasure, from anxiety to comfort, and from depression to enthusiasm. Ten key job features have been found to be associated with these axes of employee well-being. Stable personality dispositions, in terms of trait negative affectivity and trait positive affectivity, are also shown to be important, as are sociodemographic features such as age andgender. The research reviewed indicates that greater employee well-being is significantly associated with better job performance, lower absenteeism, reduced probability of leaving an employer, and the occurrence of more discretionary work behaviors. However, well-being is only one influence on these measures; other organizational and individual factors also have substantial impact. PAlD EMPLOYMENT is central to the functioning of societies and to the mental health of individuals. The majority of adults spend a large part of their life at work, and they are affected by it in multiple and sometimes conflicting ways. "Work" is usually defined in part as an activity directed to valued goals beyond enjoyment of the activity itself. (Not that work cannot be enjoyed, but immediate enjoyment is not part of the definition.) Definitions also often include a suggestion that it is a required activity and that it involves the expenditure of effort . People work in a range of settings. The focus here is on paid work, although many of the issues raised also apply to nonpaid activities: housework, voluntary work, do-it-yourself work, and so on. Paid work is often "full-time": the job takes up on average between thirty-five and forty hours a week, but traveling to and from a place of employment on average adds a further 10 percent or so (Szalai 1972). "Part-time" jobs, of course, vary in their duration, but thirty hours a week is often taken as their upper limit for statistical and survey purposes. Men have traditionally sought paid employment throughout most of their adult lives, whereas labor market participation by women has often declined after the age of about thirty. However, recent years have seen a marked increase in the number of women remaining in paid employment'rather than leaving work because of family responsibilities . For example, some 60 percent of U.S. women of conventional employment age are now economically active (Fullerton 1995). In 1950 women constituted only 33 percent of the U.S. labor force, whereas today they represent around 45 percent. For the same age range in Europe as a whole, around 50 percent of women are economically active, making up 42 percent of the workforce (European Commission 1996); in the United Kingdom, those percentages are 70 and 48 percent , respectively. Many women are employed part-time (more so in Europe than in the United States), and most of those prefer part-time to fulltime work. For example, in the United Kingdom around 80 percent of part-time women employees report that they do not want a full-time job, with most indicating that they prefer to have time for domestic and family activities (Office of National Statistics 1996). Men are less likely than women to be employed on a part-time basis, both through preference and because of aspects of national welfare schemes. (Welfare legislation has typically been designed with the full-time worker in mind.) The majority of men who work part-time are at the extremes of the labor-force age range, being either students or workers moving into retirement (Delsen 1995). The labor-force participation rate for older men has declined in recent years in many countries, so that the proportion of men who may be termed "retired" has increased accordingly. However, for many men retirement does not mean a complete cessation of paid employment; it is often partial, especially at relatively young ages. Between onequarter and one-half of retired people take up at some point either full-time or (more often) parttime work, possibly on a temporary or intermittent basis (see, for example, Myers 1991). Other labor-market developments include a shift to more short-term and temporary jobs...

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