Workplace Well-being and Performance Factors

Posted on Jun 12, 2025 in Psychology

Personal Determinants of Well-being

Well-being Defined

A state of happiness and contentment, with low levels of distress, overall good physical and mental health and outlook, or good quality of life.

Emotions and Stress

The attitude of a worker toward his or her job, often expressed as a hedonic response of liking or disliking the work itself, the rewards (pay, promotions, recognition), or the context (working conditions, colleagues). See also job involvement.

Job Satisfaction

Job Satisfaction – A positive feeling about the job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics.

  • Job Involvement – Degree of psychological “identification” with the job where perceived performance is important to self-worth.
  • Psychological Empowerment – Belief in the degree of influence over the job, competence, job meaningfulness, and autonomy.
  • Organizational Commitment – Attitude towards a particular organization and its goals, while wishing to maintain membership in the organization.
  • Perceived Organizational Support (POS) – Degree to which employees believe the organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being. Higher when rewards are fair, employees are involved in decision-making, and supervisors are seen as supportive.
  • Employee Engagement – The degree of involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the job.
  • Job Performance – Satisfied workers are more productive, and more productive workers are more satisfied. The causality may run both ways.
  • Organizational Citizenship Behaviors
  • Customer Satisfaction – Satisfied frontline employees increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.
  • Lower Absenteeism

Emotional Exhaustion and Burnout

Physical, emotional, or mental exhaustion accompanied by decreased motivation, lowered performance, and negative attitudes toward oneself and others. It results from performing at a high level until stress and tension, especially from extreme and prolonged physical or mental exertion or an overburdening workload, take their toll.

Emotional exhaustion arises from feelings of tension and frustration due to individuals’ fears that they will be unable to provide previous levels of work performance.

  • Depersonalization – The second dimension of burnout, occurs when individuals distance themselves from their work by creating dehumanizing perceptions of tasks, clients, or coworkers.
  • Reduced Personal Accomplishment – Defined as self-evaluative feelings of incompetence and lack of achievement at work.

Personality

The enduring configuration of characteristics and behavior that comprises an individual’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns. Personality is generally viewed as a complex, dynamic integration or totality shaped by many forces, including hereditary and constitutional tendencies; physical maturation; early training; identification with significant individuals and groups; culturally conditioned values and roles; and critical experiences and relationships. Various theories explain the structure and development of personality in different ways, but all agree that personality helps determine behavior. See also personality development; personality psychology; personality structure.

Personality Traits and States

  • Trait – An enduring personality characteristic that describes or determines an individual’s behavior across a range of situations.
  • State – The condition or status of an entity or system at a particular time that is characterized by relative stability of its basic components or elements. Although the components or elements are essentially qualitatively stable, it is possible for them also to be dynamic, as in a hyperactive state or a state of flux.

Emotional Labor

An employee’s expression of organizationally desired emotions during interpersonal transactions at work. It is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. This can be very damaging and often leads to stress, exhaustion, and burnout.

Types of Emotions

  • Felt Emotions: The individual’s actual emotions.
  • Displayed Emotions: Required or appropriate emotions.
  • Surface Acting: Displaying appropriately but not feeling those emotions internally. This can be very stressful.
  • Deep Acting: Changing internal feelings to match display rules.

Emotional Intelligence

A type of intelligence that involves the ability to process emotional information and use it in reasoning and other cognitive activities. It comprises four abilities: to perceive and appraise emotions accurately; to access and evoke emotions when they facilitate cognition; to comprehend emotional language and make use of emotional information; and to regulate one’s own and others’ emotions to promote growth and well-being.

Dimensions of Emotional Intelligence

  • Self-awareness: Knowing what you are feeling.
  • Self-management: Managing and controlling one’s emotions.
  • Self-motivation: The ability to bounce back after a failure (resilience).
  • Empathy: The ability to sense how others are feeling.
  • Social Skills: The ability to handle the emotions of others.

Social Determinants of Well-being

Groups

Any collection or assemblage, particularly of individuals. In social psychology, the term refers to two or more interdependent individuals who influence one another through social interactions that commonly include structures involving roles and norms, a degree of cohesiveness, and shared goals.

  • Team – An organized task-focused group. Members of such groups combine their individual inputs in a deliberate way in the pursuit of a common goal and are typically cohesive and united.

The likely result of this evolutionary selection would be a set of internal mechanisms that guide individual human beings into social groups and lasting relationships.

  • Neurological evidence demonstrates a shared location in the brain for physical pain and social pain (i.e., rejection).
  • Due to the individual’s dependence on the group, there has been a benefit for humans to sense risk of exclusion early.
  • Evolution has made social distress (e.g., perceived risk of exclusion) share the location of a more primitive center of the brain: the center that registers physical pain.

Social Identification and Categorization

The proposition that people evaluate their abilities and attitudes in relation to those of others in a process that plays a significant role in self-image and subjective well-being. Three types of social comparison are proposed in the theory:

  1. Upward Social Comparison: Comparing oneself with someone judged to be better than oneself (e.g., by having more wealth or material goods, higher social standing, greater physical attractiveness).
  2. Downward Social Comparison: Comparing oneself with someone judged to be not as good as oneself.
  3. Lateral Social Comparison: Comparing oneself with another who is considered to be more or less equal.

Traditionally, social comparison theory has held that upward comparisons promote a sense of inferiority and thus are associated with negative changes in self-concept (the contrast effect), but recent research suggests that, depending on the circumstances, upward comparisons instead may promote inspiration and be associated with positive changes in self-concept (the assimilation effect). For example, people tend to rate their abilities higher when they maintain a close relationship with a target of upward comparison but lower when the target is distant or disliked.

Emotional Contagion

Adam’s Equity Theory

Employees compare their outcomes/input ratio with that of relevant others.

  • When ratios are equal: A state of equity exists – no tension; fairness.
  • When ratios are unequal: Tension exists due to unfairness.
    • Under-rewarded: Leads to anger.
    • Over-rewarded: Leads to guilt.
  • Tension motivates people to act to bring their situation into equity.

Personal Determinants of Performance

Job Performance

  • Performance: Any activity or collection of responses that leads to a result or has an effect on the environment.
  • Effort: The persistent effort to put unfamiliar ideas into more familiar terms in an attempt to comprehend ambiguous or unfamiliar material. See repeated reproduction.
  • Goal Setting: A process that establishes specific, time-based behavior targets that are measurable, achievable, and realistic. In work-related settings, for example, this practice usually provides employees with both:
    • A basis for motivation, in terms of effort expended.
    • Guidelines or cues to behavior that will be required if the goal is to be met.
    Goal setting is effective only if individuals concerned are aware of what is to be accomplished and accept the goals for themselves, believing in their attainability. See also Locke’s theory of goal setting; performance goal.
  • Learning: The acquisition of novel information, behaviors, or abilities after practice, observation, or other experiences, as evidenced by change in behavior, knowledge, or brain function. Learning involves consciously or nonconsciously attending to relevant aspects of incoming information, mentally organizing the information into a coherent cognitive representation, and integrating it with relevant existing knowledge activated from long-term memory.
  • Achievement: The attainment of some goal, or the goal attained.
  • Creativity: The ability to produce or develop original work, theories, techniques, or thoughts. A creative individual typically displays originality, imagination, and expressiveness. Analyses have failed to ascertain why one individual is more creative than another, but creativity does appear to be a very durable trait. See also creative imagination; creative thinking; divergent thinking.
  • Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB): An action taken by an employee to benefit the organization that is not formally required by the job or that exceeds the formal requirements (e.g., voluntarily helping a coworker with a computer problem).
  • Turnover: The number of employees who leave their jobs during a given period. A distinction is generally made between controllable turnover, as by dismissal or voluntary resignation, and uncontrollable turnover, as by retirement or redundancy.
  • Absenteeism: Unjustified absence from work or school, especially when regular or persistent. Although absenteeism has been linked to job satisfaction, other factors, such as organizational culture and the absence culture in particular, may be more relevant.
  • Leadership: The processes involved in leading others, including organizing, directing, coordinating, and motivating their efforts toward achieving certain group or organizational goals. Leadership tends to be reciprocal (leaders influence followers, and followers influence leaders), transactional (leaders and followers exchange their time, energies, and skills to increase their joint rewards), transformational (leaders inspire and motivate followers), and cooperative rather than coercive (followers voluntarily accept the leader’s suggestions).

Campbell’s 8 Dimensions of Job Performance

  1. Job-specific task proficiency
  2. Non-job-specific task proficiency
  3. Written and oral communication
  4. Demonstrating effort
  5. Maintaining personal discipline
  6. Facilitating peer and team performance
  7. Supervision/leadership
  8. Management/administrative

Classical Motivation Theories

  1. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory

    Do people really move up the needs in this fashion? If your social need is not satisfied, do you really not care about esteem? Empirical research has struggled to support this model.

  2. Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory

    Key Point: Satisfaction and dissatisfaction are not opposites but separate constructs.

  3. McClelland’s Theory of Needs

    Issue: Not a very practical theory because the needs are difficult to measure.

  4. Vroom’s Expectancy Theory

    Treats people as if they are robots; assumes that people are altogether calculative when they determine what goals and behaviors to pursue and not. This is often not the case.

Contemporary Motivation Theories

  1. Self-Determination Theory

    • Pursuing goals which are integrated with your interests, values, or beliefs is more interesting and enjoyable/fun.
    • Choosing a job which is aligned to own intrinsic interests has benefits.

    With reference to two moderators: performance type (quality vs. quantity) and incentive contingency (directly performance-salient vs. indirectly performance-salient), intrinsic motivation is a medium to strong predictor of performance.

    With respect to performance, incentives and intrinsic motivation are not necessarily antagonistic and are best considered simultaneously:

    • Intrinsic motivation predicted more unique variance in quality of performance.
    • Incentives were a better predictor of quantity of performance.

    Providing an extrinsic reward for behavior that had been previously only intrinsically rewarding tends to decrease the overall level of motivation and performance.

    Major Implications for Work Rewards
    • Intrinsic and extrinsic rewards are not independent.
    • Extrinsic rewards (sometimes) decrease intrinsic rewards.
    • For most jobs, pay should not be contingent on performance.

  2. Goal-Setting Theory

    • Basic Premise – Specific and difficult goals, with (self-generated) feedback, lead to higher performance.
    • Why? Difficult Goals
      • Energizes people to work harder.
      • Difficulty increases motivation (persistence/dedication).
      • Focuses and directs attention and forces people to increase effectiveness.
    • Relationship between goals and performance depends on:
      • Goal commitment (the more public, the better!).
      • Task characteristics (simple, well-learned).
      • Culture (best match is in North America).

  3. Self-Efficacy

    Self-efficacy – An individual’s belief that he or she is capable of performing a task. Self-Efficacy complements Goal-Setting Theory.

    Increasing Self-Efficacy
    • Enactive Mastery
      • Most important source of efficacy.
      • Gaining relevant experience with task or job [“Practice makes perfect”].
    • Vicarious Modeling
      • Increasing confidence by watching others perform the task.
      • Most effective when observer sees the model to be like him- or herself.
    • Verbal Persuasion
      • Motivation through verbal conviction.
      • Pygmalion and Galatea effects – self-fulfilling prophecies.
    • Arousal
      • Getting “psyched up” – emotionally aroused – to complete task.
      • Can hurt performance if emotion is not a component of the task.

    Motivation is not a singular item: we are motivated by many things. No single theory of motivation is able to capture all aspects of motivation.

    To Motivate Employees, You Need To:
    • Recognize individual differences.
    • Use goals and feedback.
    • Help them feel that it is possible.
    • Allow employees to participate in decisions that affect them.
    • Link rewards to performance.
    • Link rewards to personal ambitions.
    • Check the reward system for equity.