Employee well-being is one of the most studied outcomes in organizational research, operationalized variously as job satisfaction, affective well-being, work engagement, work meaningfulness, or lack of burnout – with critics arguing that also more eudaimonic dimensions focusing on optimal functioning and need satisfaction should be included. What is lacking is a unified theoretical framework integrating various disparate research streams around separate well-being indicators. The present work offers one such organizing framework, building on self-determination theory and Erik Allardt’s multidimensional theory of well-being, which sees key dimensions of well-being as emanating from human nature. In particular, I identify four existential conditions for well-being: Being focuses on experiencing well-being at work (evaluative, affective, and conative well-being), having focuses on getting the resources required for survival and safety from work, loving focuses on getting one’s interpersonal needs met at work, and doing focuses on getting one’s agentic needs for autonomy and competence met at work. Functional well-being emanates from having needs related to having, loving, and doing satisfied at work, explaining to a large degree how much experienced well-being employees have at work. This integrative framework helps both scholars and practitioners to make more informed choices about what dimensions of employee well-being to measure.
