Modified General Employee Well-Being Scale

Employee Well-Being

Ryan and Deci (2001) posited that employee well-being emerged from two research streams: hedonic studies that examined well-being related to pleasure and the absence of pain; and eudaimonic studies that explored happiness as self-realization. Ryan and Deci considered employee well-being as a multi-dimensional concept including both hedonic and eudaimonic properties. According to Fisher (2003), higher levels of employees’ perceptions of well-being positively correlate with employees’ productivity. Grant et al. (2007), Baptiste (2008), and Zheng et al. (2015) concurred with Fisher and purported that employee well-being is important to organizations' performance as well as survival because of the positive relationship between employees’ perception of well-being and employees’ performance. Grant et al. defined employees’ well-being as “the overall quality of an employee’s experience and functioning at work” (p. 52). Page and Vella-Brodrick (2009) reported that employee well-being (EWB) consisted of “high-levels of positive impact, low levels of negative impact, and cognitive evaluation of one's satisfaction with their life as a whole” (p. 443) and that someone with positive well-being is said to be in a state of “positive psychological functioning” (p. 443). Poulsen and Ipsen (2017) added to the discussion of well-being by pointing out that managers’ attitudes and behaviors contribute to perceived well-being by both on-site and distance-based employees.

Zheng et al. (2015) emphasized the importance of employee well-being in that the concept has interested scholars since the earliest of times, thus tying the concept to human flourishing, which is, according to Kleinig and Evans (2013), similar to Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia that includes both process and achievement and has, as it end goal, to achieve a high quality of life and well-being for themselves and others (p. 540-541). Hendrix et al. (1994) concluded that low levels of employee well-being contributed to absenteeism, which Hendrix et al. inferred to be an avoidance tactic by employees who were seeking to improve their short-term well-being.

Testing Dupuy’S General Well-Being Scale

Taylor et al. (2003) conducted a factor analysis study of “599 African–American women from four geographic regions of the United States” (p. 32) using Dupuy’s (1978) instrument. Taylor et al.'s study focused on participants’ two conditions that might contribute to the participants' perception of well-being: (a) all participants were overweight with (b) low to moderate physical activity. Taylor et al. used Dubuy’s original items but did not find the six dimensions reported by Dupuy (1978). Taylor et al. found three highly correlated factors indicating a possibility that fewer factors might be useful. Taylor et al. also posited that using both positive and negative wording may have led to the creation of three factors in their study. Taylor et al. conducted another factor analysis using four of the highest correlated items of Dupuy’s instrument with the 18-item total score. They found that the four items explained 85% of the variance.