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Long-Term Development of Employee Well-Being: A Latent Transition Approach

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Abstract

The long-term development of employee well-being is still poorly understood. Consequently, in this three-wave 10-year longitudinal study among Finnish managers (n = 402) the development of employee well-being was examined in in detail. Specifically, the long-term development of job-related affective well-being was investigated at the intra-individual level, simultaneously taking into account positive and negative indicators of well-being, the level of well-being, and the direction of change. Further, the issue how (changes in) job resources and employee well-being were related across time was examined. By applying a novel person-centered methodology, factor mixture modeling and latent transition analysis, the results revealed that the development of favorable job-related affective well-being was eight times more probable than that of unfavorable development across the 10-year study period. Job resources predicted a high level of job-related well-being and, also, job resources increased along with favorable changes in well-being. Overall, the findings contribute to knowledge in the area of positive occupational health psychology by offering a detailed picture of the level of job-related affective well-being and its development over time.

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Acknowledgments

The FINNMA-10 research project was financed by the Finnish Work Environment Fund (Grant No. 105363). This study was supported by a grant from the Academy of Finland to Anne Mäkikangas (Grant No. 258882).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Jyvaskyla, P.O. Box 35, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Anne Mäkikangas, Katriina Hyvönen & Taru Feldt

  2. Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Wilmar Schaufeli

  3. Department of Psychology, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Wilmar Schaufeli

  4. Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Jyvaskyla, Jyväskylä, Finland

    Esko Leskinen

  5. School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland

    Ulla Kinnunen

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  1. Anne Mäkikangas
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  5. Katriina Hyvönen
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Correspondence to Anne Mäkikangas.

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Mäkikangas, A., Schaufeli, W., Leskinen, E. et al. Long-Term Development of Employee Well-Being: A Latent Transition Approach. J Happiness Stud 17, 2325–2345 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-015-9696-7

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