We Hope You Are Well: The Co-Creation of Wellbeing by Individuals in Organizations

Abstract

Organizations and individuals invest resources in supporting employee wellbeing, a trend that has intensified in recent years. Despite this increased emphasis on enhancing wellbeing, employees continue to vary in terms of the state of their wellbeing. To gain insight into how and why employee wellbeing statuses vary, I adopted an inductive approach to explore the diverse contributors to employee wellbeing outcomes. This exploration involved interviews with 57 employees at a single organization and uncovered a wide array of wellbeing facilitators, factors that support employee wellbeing, and wellbeing inhibitors, factors that are detrimental to employee wellbeing. I examined what employees identified as contributors to the state of their wellbeing and developed a theoretical framework outlining archetypes of employees that relate to high and low levels of wellbeing. Drawing on the interviews with participants who reported low and high wellbeing statuses, I examined contextual factors that contributed to employee wellbeing. Contributing to the body of work that examines how contextual factors impact employee wellbeing, I elucidated the role of historical comparison, finding that employees make comparisons between their current context to their historical contexts to validate their present state of wellbeing. In highlighting the role of the past to the present, I revealed how employees support themselves by trying to leverage coping skills developed in the past. As a result, existing skills act as reinforcing, compensatory, or ineffective contributors to their wellbeing. In highlighting the role of employee comparisons between their past context and their present, and the ways that coping skills may or may not support their wellbeing, I uncovered findings that may shape future research and organizational endeavors to support employee wellbeing.