Well Being And The Quality Of Working Lives

This insightful book draws together expansive international and interdisciplinary evidence to develop a comprehensive framework for understanding and enhancing workplace well-being through the lens of job quality. It analyses how paid work influences the well-being of workers, the organizations for which they complete tasks of employment, and the societies in which we live.

The growing diversity of contemporary paid work has provoked increased interest in understanding and evaluating the quality of working lives. This Handbook provides critical reflections on recent research in the field, including examining the inextricable links between working life and well-being.

Work-related stress is costly not only to employees, but also to organizations and society. For example, it is estimated that work-related stress, depression, and anxiety costs British employers £1,035 per employee and that workplace stress costs the US economy up to $300 billion annually. However, elevated levels of stress often cannot be changed, and, if demands were not placed on employees, employee learning, organizational innovation, and societal economic growth would be hindered. Consequently, it is vital that occupational health practitioners, employees, employers and researchers strive to better understand and manage workplace stress, such that employee health and well-being can be improved. This book can assist organizations and individuals as they encounter workplace stress. This edition highlights research done by 25 authors across 12 chapters that challenges how work stress is viewed and assessed. Additionally, a number of social and psychological influences on the stress experience are examined. Our beliefs and expectations of stress and its results, whether helpful or hurtful, can have a profound influence on our stress experiences. Also, the way that we approach our work (e.g., job crafting) or the treatment we receive from others (e.g., with dignity) can either mitigate or exacerbate any harmful or beneficial effects of stress. Moreover, how we assess the psychological (e.g., burnout and well-being) or physiological (e.g., cortisol) outcomes of stress are meaningful, and the proper diagnosis of stress (e.g., stress surveys) underlies our understanding. We hope that the findings reported in these chapters and the insights of these scholars will provide ways for you and/or your organization to improve the health and well-being of employees.

This book offers twelve chapters organized into three major sections that address occupational stress and quality of working life. The authors are an internationally renowned team of scholar-research-practitioners who are grounded in applied science and clinical practice. Section 1 includes five chapters that address the organizational and individual costs of occupational stress. The costs are humanitarian and economic; both human suffering and financial burdens are important. Section 2 includes three chapters that focus on ways to mitigate the negative effects of occupational stress. We must help those who are suffering but we must do more by preventing distress where we can and building on positive, strength factors where possible. Section 3 includes four chapters that examine and expand our understanding of work life quality. Work life quality is so important because of the effects it has on workers and leaders, as well as the spillover impact into families and communities. These twelve chapters, highlight both core knowledge and new developments within the rapidly growing field of research on stress and the quality of working life. We believe this information can help to raise awareness of the causes and costs of occupational stress and poor quality of working life. Further, this should provide a challenge, some incentive, and renewed insight for organizations in Brazil and elsewhere to begin thinking about and acting in ways that lead to a less stressful environment for their workforce.

This book was developed for the 2005 International Stress Management Association Conference in Brazil. The original book was recently published in Portuguese, but because of the popularity of the topics and the world-renowned stress scholars who contributed chapters, we are very pleased to have the opportunity to publish this work in English. A book on the subject is intended to be an additional tool containing information on stress and ways of dealing with pressures and demands, because we know that the level of stress will continue to increase. We believe that only through information—and here you will be able to find the experience and opinion of some of the greatest and best professionals of the world in this field—people will manage to live better and more balanced lives. This is what ISMA-BR wishes and hopes for. Have a good reading. This volume provides a series of comprehensive summaries of what is now a fast-growing literature aimed at understanding the causes, effects, and prevention of stress in the workplace. It begins with three chapters on different sources of stress at work, ranging from organizational factors to attributes of workers themselves.

In this book, we can read about the well-being, quality of life, and quality of working life. The authors come from different countries, and their ideas, studies, findings, and experiences offer beneficial contributions to enhance our knowledge in the field of well-being and quality of life, as well as quality of working life. The book is divided into two sections, and their respective chapters refer to two major areas. The first section covers "Different Perspectives of Quality of Life," considering the antecedents of happiness, quality of life and sports, quality of life indexes for the United States, well-being in the context of family policies in European countries, cultural well-being and income in Italy, and the right to life in South Africa. The second section deals with "Well-Being and Quality of Working Life," emphasizing these topics for university professors in Brazil, as well as work-related well-being, psychological well-being of individuals as employees, physical and psychical well-being and stress, human work in organizations considering the discomfort perspective, and professional pride and dignity among social workers. Thus, we consider this book will be of interest for readers with a diverse group of audience in different areas of specialty such as psychology, industrial and social psychology, management, medicine, education, law, and sociology.

Happiness at work.......your quality of life and sometimes your life depends on it. Work is an important part of the life of the modern man, as it always has been, but work has become more complicated that before. Today what we do is often done as a part of a large organisation. The work is often abstract manipulation of matter or information, and the value created by the single member of the organisation has become increasingly difficult to measure. Organisations have become increasingly responsible for not only the physical work environment, but also for the mental working environment, and factors like stress and sexual harassment are becoming more and more regulated by company rules and culture. The health of the employees has become a major financial interest of the company as only healthy employees and leaders can perform optimally. Often the companies have health insurance for their people. Today employees and leaders also expect work to provide their life with meaning and stimulating experiences and developing challenges. Scholarly knowledge is substituted with experiential learning in a developing and dynamic environment. Society is developing fast and only companies with modern, well-oriented and culturally integrated employees can win the competition by offering costumers, clients or patients the best products and services. A strong association between quality of life, development of personal character, self-realisation, development of talents and skills, physical and mental health, meaning of life, sense of coherence and similar core concepts of modern medical and psychosocial sciences have in many studies now been strongly associated with work satisfaction, joy on the job and similar concepts. The scientific challenge we have taken upon our shoulders is to put the whole messy and chaotic area in order, and create a formula according to which the actual integrated status of worker can be calculated. We have decided to call the integrated concept of all above mentioned dimensions for working life quality, similar to the well-known global quality of life concept in medicine and social sciences. We are proud to present, in the present book, a mathematical formula from which the created value of an employee or leader can be known, if only the working life quality is known. We also provide a questionnaire for measuring the quality of working life, based on a theory of quality of working life. We have in a study on a random sample of the Danish population found a strong statistical association between the measured quality of working life and health. We started the research in quality of working life in 1994, and the first version of the QWL-theory was ready in 1996. In 1997 it was empirically tested in a study involving 1,500 persons and 30 companies. After adjusting the questionnaire and analysis of the data we further improved our understanding to the level that we are happy to present in this book, based on a number of published scientific papers.

This book is intended for human resources management academics, researchers, students, organizational leaders and managers, HR Practitioners, and those responsible for helping support employees in the 21st-century workplace. It offers a path forward to create an environment that will not only build a healthier workplace by providing appropriate and effective well-being interventions but also offers solutions to manage multi-generational and ‘holistic’ employees within the employment relationship. The book describes the factors that promote healthy and WELL organizations and introduces concepts and strategies to reduce workplace stress and mental health issues and improve workplace well-being toward sustained organizational success. Employers that embrace the corporate responsibility of promoting the health and well-being of multi-generational, holistic employees will reap cost savings, employee engagement, and productivity advantages, as well as a healthier and more productive workforce.