Impact of work variables and safety appraisal on well-being at work

Work environments have been encountering tremendous changes since the early 1990s. The enlargement of flexibility practices has raised concerns about well-being at work but also about safety. These two research areas, i.e. safety and well-being at work, have a strong tradition of diagnosis and research but there are few examples in the literature that attempt to link the two areas. Our goal in this study was to analyze the impact of both work variables and safety appraisal on well-being within a context of organizational changes. We used questionnaires on 4297 workers from a large company in the energy sector that has encountered big organizational changes these last years. Job control dimensions, safety appraisal, eustress and distress were measured using existing questionnaires. The results give some evidence for an additive explanation of eustress when adding safety appraisal in the hierarchical regression analysis. The additive effect of safety appraisal on distress was also significant but not enough strong to be considered seriously. A path analysis has shown that the effect of management safety climate on distress was rather an indirect effect through the job control dimensions.