SUSTAINABLE WELL-BEING AT WORK: A REVIEW AND REFORMULATION

Abstract

One of the main goals of work and organizational psychology is to promote the well-being and performance of employees. Nevertheless, the yoke of the current economic crisis tyrannizes this aim, mercilessly threating the sustainability of the well-being and performance achieved in previous decades. The decrease in one of these factors may hamper the other, resulting in a vicious circle. In this context, one of the biggest challenges faced by organizational psychologists is to reverse this trend in a virtuous cycle, where promoting high levels of well-being creates a performance improvement and vice-versa, in a “sustainable well-being-productivity synergy sustainable productivity and well-being synergy”. However, previous efforts have shown inconclusive results. We argue that the neglectfulness and lack of rigorousness of the most contemporaneous conceptualizations of well-being and job performance, as common praxis, are part of the reason for these disappointing results. The aim of the present paper is to provide a review of the contributions and efforts to the new reformulation of the concept of well-being and productivity. It also aims to integrate the most contemporaneous concepts of well-being and job performance, revisiting the “happy productive-worker thesis”, and using as framework Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, where the suitability and sustainability of the alternative models of “unhappy-productive worker” and “happy-unproductive worker” will be discussed.

Keywords

• Well-being
• Job performance
• Sustainable well-being synergy
• The happy productive-worker thesis
• The broadenand- build theory.