Phd in PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE

Thesis title: The multifaceted association among work characteristics and employee well-being

It is well-known that work characteristics, whether not properly assessed and managed, may lead to well-being issues. The present dissertation brings together three contributions which aim to provide a comprehensive and nuanced picture of the association among work characteristics and well-being. In Study 1, (a) we summarize the major generic and contextual work characteristics of the European healthcare sector which may stem from three different sources, and (b) quantify their prospective associations with well-being using meta-analysis. In Study 2, (c) we identify different patterns of interactions of job demands and resources in a sample of healthcare providers, and (d) explore whether these patterns are differently associated with job satisfaction. Finally, in Study 3 (e) we investigate the degree of stability and fluctuations of work characteristics and well-being over a period of three months, and (f) examine the associations among these variables at the between-persons and the within-person levels. Overall, our results confirm that work characteristics are related to employee well-being and that their association is complex and multifaceted. In Study 1 we found that work characteristics at either of the sources (group, leadership and organization) or typologies (generic or healthcare-specific) were prospectively related to well-being. In Study 2, Latent Profile Analysis and Bayesian informative hypothesis testing revealed four patterns of job demands and resources differently associated with job satisfaction, thus confirming that work characteristics may also exert joint effects on well-being. Finally, in Study 3 we found that about two-thirds of the true variance in work characteristics and well-being was accounted for by the between-persons component, thus revealing considerable within-person variations in these variables. Moreover, a non-negligible proportion of variance in well-being was accounted for by work characteristics at within-person level. Implications for theory and practice of the present dissertation, as well as limitations and suggestions for future research, are discussed.