Thesis title: Promoting Workplace Well-Being: an Integrated View on Personal Perspectives, Social Context, and Work Arrangements
Workplace well-being is shaped by processes unfolding within individuals, between colleagues, and within the way work is designed and enacted. This doctoral dissertation advances an integrated view of workplace well-being by examining complementary determinants across personal perspectives, social context, and work arrangements.
Chapter 1 addresses the individual layer by introducing Work Cognitive Personal Demands (WCPD), which represent rigid, maladaptive appraisal tendencies that can amplify the perceived intensity of job demands and constrain the recognition and mobilization of resources. Across two studies with 1,029 employees, the 24-item WCPD Questionnaire showed a robust six-factor structure, satisfactory reliability, and evidence of measurement invariance, while displaying theoretically coherent associations with personal resources, burnout, well-being, and self-rated performance.
Chapter 2 turns to the relational layer by examining how exposure to others’ burnout shapes interpersonal functioning within teams. Drawing on Emotions-as-Social-Information and Strength and Vulnerability Integration perspectives, a multilevel study of 337 employees nested in 53 teams showed that burnout prevalence, both as individually perceived and as a team-level climate, was positively associated with interpersonal strain. Safety-seeking, an interpersonal emotion-regulation strategy aimed at obtaining reassurance, buffered this association at the individual level, with stronger protective effects for younger (vs. older) employees.
Chapter 3 focuses on the organizational layer by studying when flexible work arrangements become satisfying over time. In a three-wave longitudinal study over one year (N = 359), crafting leadership predicted increases in employees’ time–spatial job crafting. However, only space crafting mediated the link between crafting leadership and subsequent workplace flexibility satisfaction, and this indirect effect emerged primarily when compressed workweek use was higher.
Overall, the dissertation highlights that sustainable well-being depends on aligned action across layers: fostering cognitive flexibility in work appraisals, preventing burnout climates that erode relationships, and enabling proactive adaptation to flexibility through supportive leadership and resource-building practices.