Well-being and ill-being at work: Employee's representations in a Brazilian public company

Abstract

The present work aims to identify the thematic cores concerning employees' representations of well-being and ill-being at work in a Brazilian public company. Data were collected using open-ended questions from the Quality of Work Life Assessment Questionnaire. 5,833 workers participated in the study and were predominantly male (62%), with a mean age of 46.7 (SD = 11.61), married (58.7%), and with higher education (37.17%). We used the software Alceste for data treatment. The results revealed that the main sources of ill-being at work was bureaucratic labor organization (25%) and of well-being at work was importance and meaningfulness of work (24%). Organizational management is at the origin of ill-being at work and must be the object of corporate changes.