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What Makes for a Good Job? Evidence Using Subjective Wellbeing Data

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The Economics of Happiness

Abstract

We study what makes for a good job, by looking at which workplace characteristics are conducive or detrimental to job satisfaction. Using data from 37 countries around the world in the 2015 Work Orientations module of the International Social Survey Programme, we find that having an interesting job and good relationships at work, especially with management, are the strongest positive predictors of how satisfied employees are with their jobs, along with wages. Stressful or dangerous jobs, as well as those that interfere with family life, have the strongest negative correlation with job satisfaction. We discuss implications for firms and other organisations as well as for public policy-makers, and point toward future avenues for research in the area.

An extended version of this chapter was published as Krekel, C., G. Ward, and J.-E. De Neve, “Work and Wellbeing: A Global Perspective,” in: Sachs, J. (ed), Global Happiness Policy Report, 2018. An online appendix with additional tables and figures (as well as full replication materials) can be found at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/0EEOTM. For helpful advice and comments, we are very grateful to Amy Blankson, Andrew Clark, Cary Cooper, Ed Diener, Jim Harter, John Helliwell, Jenn Lim, Richard Layard, Paul Litchfield, Ewan McKinnon, Jennifer Moss, Mike Norton, Mariano Rojas, Jeffrey Sachs, Martin Seligman, and Ashley Whillans.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See OECD (2017a) for data on daily time use in OECD countries.

  2. 2.

    See Web Appendix Table W1, adapted from van Praag et al. (2003).

  3. 3.

    See Tenney et al. (2016) for a review on the relationship between people’s wellbeing and labour market outcomes, as well as Judge et al. (2001) and Harrison et al. (2006) for recent meta-analyses. See Whitman et al. (2010) for a recent meta-analysis on people’s wellbeing and firm performance.

  4. 4.

    Of course, some of these domains are more prevalent in certain occupations and industries than in others.

  5. 5.

    For a comprehensive summary of a systematic review on the relationship between job quality and wellbeing, see also What Works Centre for Wellbeing (2017a).

  6. 6.

    The important role of purpose for performance has also been studied in educational contexts: Yeager et al. (2014) show that promoting a pro-social, self-transcendent purpose improves academic self-regulation in students.

  7. 7.

    The company later offered the option to work from home to the whole firm, allowing formerly treated employees to re-select between working from home or working in the office: about half of them switched back, which almost doubled performance gains to 22%. This highlights the importance of accounting for self-selection and learning. In fact, in a recent discrete choice experiment, Mas and Pallais (2017) demonstrate that employee preferences for flexible work practices are quite heterogeneous: while most employees prefer a little extra income over flexibility, to a small number of employees, flexible work practices are very important.

  8. 8.

    On the importance of learning on the job for wellbeing, see also What Works Centre for Wellbeing (2017b).

  9. 9.

    On the importance of team work more generally for wellbeing, see What Works Centre for Wellbeing (2017c).

  10. 10.

    Note that pro-social behaviour is distinct from altruism in that it is not purely motivated by increasing another individual’s welfare, but can be motivated by, for example, empathy, reciprocity, or self-image (Evren and Minardi 2017).

  11. 11.

    For example, at the national level, following recommendations by Dolan and Metcalfe (2012), the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the UK now routinely asks people how they think and feel about their lives, including four items, on evaluative (life satisfaction), experiential (happiness, anxiousness), and eudemonic (worthwhileness) measures of subjective wellbeing in its surveys.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. London School of Economics, London, UK

    Christian Krekel

  2. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    George Ward

  3. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jan-Emmanuel De Neve

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  1. Christian Krekel
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Correspondence to Jan-Emmanuel De Neve .

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  1. FLACSO-México & UPAEP, Tlalpan, Ciudad de México, Mexico

    Mariano Rojas

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Krekel, C., Ward, G., De Neve, JE. (2019). What Makes for a Good Job? Evidence Using Subjective Wellbeing Data. In: Rojas, M. (eds) The Economics of Happiness. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15835-4_11

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