Essays on workplace well-being

Abstract

This thesis consists of three chapters that address different facets of employee well-being. Chapter 1 examines how employees make sense by seeking feedback from both leaders and coworkers. We propose that proactively seeking feedback from others in the workplace enables the sense-making process to encourage process regarding their own job/role and enhances the employee¿s work meaningfulness. The enhanced work meaningfulness, in turn, drives employees to take personal initiatives at work, which then results in higher performance. We collected longitudinal data and used the latent change score (LCS) method to analyze the dynamic process. Chapter 2 tested how performance pressure intensifies envy towards the coworker and then leads to surface acting¿a strategy of image management moderated by emotional intelligence. This research was done with both experiments and time-lagged survey studies. Chapter 3 argues that the follower¿s work meaningfulness serves as the initiating factor of social exchange between the follower and the leader, which produces trust from the leader via enhanced task performance and organizational citizenship behavior oriented towards the organization (OCBO). In addition, there is a gender difference, such that the effect of work meaningfulness on task performance and OCBO and, sequentially, the leader's trust are stronger for male employees than for female employees. This study uses a multi-source (leader and follower) and multi-time survey design.