A comprehensive concomitant analysis of service employees’ well-being and performance

an article by Fiona Edgar, Alan Geare and Jing A. Zhang, (University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand) published in Personnel Review Volume 46 Issue 8 (November 2017)

Abstract

Purpose
The connection between employees’ well-being and performance, although widely studied in organizational psychology, has received much less attention from HRM scholars. The purpose of this paper is to extend the literature by examining the impacts of the multidimensional structure of well-being consisting of psychological, social and health dimensions on employees’ task and contextual performance.

Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected data from 281 employees from the New Zealand service sector using a questionnaire survey. Factor analysis was used to determine items that form various facets of well-being and performance constructs. Hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to test the well-being – performance relationship.

Findings
The findings show that different facets of well-being differentially contribute to employees’ task and contextual performance. Specifically, the facets of happiness and trust were positively associated with both task and contextual performance, while the effects of life satisfaction and work life balance on task and contextual performance were insignificant. Moreover, work intensification was only associated with task performance, in contrast, job satisfaction and over commitment were only related to contextual performance.

Practical implications
The implications of these findings are two-fold. For researchers, a review and overhaul of the conceptualization and operationalization of well-being in HRM studies is long overdue. For managers, improvements to employees’ job performance and the organization’s health can result from simultaneously enhancing multiple dimensions of employees’ well-being.

Originality/value
This study provides new insights into the complex relationship between well-being and performance by incorporating a multidimensional and multifaceted perspective of well-being and highlighting the distinctive effects of various facets of well-being on different types of employees’ performance.

---