Mental well-being at work : Support and protective factors of work engagement and work-life balance in contemporary working life
Year: 2023
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Background: The promotion of mental well-being at work, including work engagement and work-life balance, is a top priority for organizations worldwide. Organizations are likely to benefit from prioritizing mental well-being at work in several ways. Besides contributing to a health-promoting society, it can enhance organizational productivity. In addition, contemporary worldwide trends, including globalization, the rapid technological advancement, and an increasingly diverse workforce change not only the nature of work tasks but also the terms and conditions of working life, which inevitably put pressure on workers and raise concerns about their mental wellbeing at work. As the previously tributed Nordic welfare model is increasingly contested, this applies to the Finnish working life as well, warranting research on the support and protective factors of mental well-being at work. Aim: To examine psychosocial factors that are associated with mental well-being at work, particularly with work engagement and work-life balance, to examine whether these two aspects of mental well-being are associated, and to gather the evidence base for the effectiveness of interventions focused on promoting work engagement by developing workplace resources from bottom-up. Methods: This thesis constitutes four separate studies. Studies 1–3 were based on data from two different population-based, cross-sectional interview survey studies. Studies 1 and 2 were based on sub-data from the Statistics Finland’s 2018 Quality of Work Life Survey (QWLS; OSF, 2018). Specific inclusion criteria were applied in both studies to meet the study aim, resulting in a sample constituting N=1431 respondents in Study 1 and N=3790 respondents in Study 2. Logistic regression (Odds Ratios, 95 % confidence intervals) was used to analyze the data in these two studies. Study 3 (N=35401), in turn, utilized sub-data from the European Working Conditions Survey 2015 (EWCS, 2015), and data were analyzed using multilevel regression modelling. Study 4 was a systematic review and meta-analysis. Systematic searches were conducted in multiple online databases. Publication year range was 2000–2020. Eligibility criteria were defined, for example specifying that the interventions had to aim at promoting work engagement by developing workplace resources from bottom-up. A meta-analysis was conducted on a sub-set of the included studies. Results: Key findings from Studies 1–3 in this thesis highlight that support and protective factors of mental well-being at work go beyond individual factors, as they also include psychosocial factors in the family and work settings, as well as socio-economic factors in the country and welfare regime settings. An important contribution of Study 3 was the demonstrated positive association between work engagement and work-life balance at the European level. Further, levels of work engagement and work-life balance were generally high among the studied workers in the Finnish (Studies 1 and 2) and in broader terms – Nordic and European (Study 3) – welfare contexts. While this supports the continued use of a universal working life model in the Nordic welfare states, part of the findings in Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that the model fails to deliver on its promises, particularly promises of an equal working life for men and women. At the same time, a key finding of Study 4 was that a standardized, universal approach is to prefer over a tailored approach in bottom-up interventions specifically aimed at promoting work engagement. The meta-analysis in Study 4 was based on 24 studies and showed a small but promising intervention effect on work engagement. Conclusion: Taken together, the findings of this thesis make clear that a system-oriented thinking is needed, in which factors at multiple levels are considered in the promotion of mental well-being at work. This means that not only background, psychological, and psychosocial factors in the work setting should be considered in research on mental well-being at work, but also psychosocial factors in the family setting as well as overarching, contextual factors in the socio-economic setting. The findings also stress the need for research to go beyond the traditional focus on negative aspects of mental well-being at work, to also include positive aspects. Further, the results demonstrated in this thesis advocate the use of an integrative perspective, as this can further our understanding of mental well-being at work and how it is best supported and protected in contemporary working life.
Source: Doria (University of Helsinki)
Author: Janina M Björk-Fant
Language: English
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6983471109