Well-being at Work: Contributions of a Person-centred Study
Despite growing interest in organizational behaviour and, especially, in well-being at work, this concept still lacks clarity. Our aim is to show that it is more informative to study it in a differentiated manner than through a global score, in order to describe its links with positive and negative attitudes. The multidimensionality of well-being at work makes this person-centred approach possible. Thus, people can be clustered in profiles based on the composition of the specific score they gave on each dimension of well-being at work. A latent profiles analysis conducted on a large sample of 865 people reveals five distinct profiles. The first profile includes people who reported the lowest scores of the sample, whereas the second is close to the average of the four dimensions. We named them lack well-being and benchmark well-being profiles, respectively. Very positive relations with the supervisor and material environment characterize the third profile. These dimensions symbolized the organization. We therefore called it organizational well-being profile. We called the fourth one full well-being due to the highest positive relations recorded on all dimensions. The last profile is social well-being because of the high quality relations with coworkers. Based on these first empirical results, a multinomial logistic regression shows that the most positive links with expected exogenous attitudes, such as affective organizational commitment and satisfaction at work, involve the full profile, then, in order of magnitude, the organizational, social, benchmark and lack profiles. The association with intention to quit is the reverse. These results call for managers to differentiate their encouraging practices based on the well-being at work profile to which employees belong. They also show that the dimensions of the concept are not concurrent.