Interventions to improve employee well-being

Considering that work itself and work characteristics have a considerable impact on individuals' well-being and considering that adults spend more than one-third of their waking hours at work (Burke, 2017), researchers as well as practitioners have sought to identify ways to improve employee well-being through workplace interventions. Well-being is an umbrella concept that has been conceptualized in different ways and encompasses a wide range of dimensions (Burke, 2017). Organizational research has predominantly adopted the hedonic perspective of well-being (Sonnentag, 2015), which focuses on people's emotional/affective and cognitive evaluations of their lives and concerns what laypeople refer to as happiness and satisfaction (Diener, Oishi, & Lucas, 2003). In this tradition, high subjective well-being is indicated by the experience of positive affective states, the absence of negative affective states, and positive cognitive evaluations of being satisfied with one's life as a whole or with specific life domains, such as work (Diener et al., 2003; Sonnentag, 2015). Frequently, intervention research focuses on employee experiences that signal a lack of well-being, such as negative emotions, psychological strain, psychosomatic complaints, work-family conflict, or burnout. Increasingly, however, scholars have also been addressing positive aspects of work-related well-being including positive emotions, job satisfaction, work engagement, thriving, or flow (Sonnentag, 2015). The breadth of the overall concept of employee well-being and its underlying dimensions will be reflected in our review of intervention research, which has also used a wide range of well-being-related outcome variables.