A Holistic Approach to Employee Well-being and Mental Health: Causes, Connections, and Underlying Processes

The purpose of this dissertation is to advance the understanding of employee well-being and mental health by adopting a holistic well-being approach, i.e., investigating positive and negative indicators simultaneously. I strive to achieve this purpose through three aims: 1) to better understand different effort–reward (im)balances and their impact on employee well-being and mental health, 2) to obtain knowledge on the temporal precedence between job boredom and mental health, and 3) to clarify the process through which career crafting impacts employee well-being. To achieve these aims, I present the results of three empirical articles that analyze Finnish survey data with structural equation modeling. The first article draws from the classic work stress model of Effort-Reward Imbalance to identify emerging latent profiles of (im)balanced states from a cross-sectional sample of young Finnish workers (<i<n</i> = 1356). The results suggest that different (im)balanced states may have different impacts, promoting positive and mitigating negative employee well-being (job satisfaction, work engagement, job boredom, and burnout) and mental health (life satisfaction, positive functioning, anxiety, and depression). The second article draws from the Conservation of Resources theory to explore the temporal precedence between job boredom and mental health. The results, based on a two-wave follow-up survey of young Finnish workers (<i>n</i> = 513), indicate that job boredom may be considered an antecedent to a decrease in life satisfaction and positive functioning, and an increase in anxiety and depression. Finally, the third article draws bridges between the crafting and social identity frameworks, to hypothesize that career crafting improves employee well-being (work engagement, job boredom, and burnout) by strengthening professional and organizational identification. The results, based on a two-wave follow-up survey of Finnish workers (<i>n</i> = 842), support all but one of the hypothesized associations. That is, career crafting does not mitigate job boredom via professional identification. This dissertation makes valuable theoretical, empirical, and practical contributions to the field of organizational and occupational health psychology, by adopting a holistic well-being approach to extending established theories, such as the Effort-Reward Imbalance model, and by advancing the literature on emerging themes such as job boredom and career crafting.