As societal concern shifts from financial survival towards quality of life issues, both in and outside of the workplace, scholarly interest in employee well-being too has risen greatly in recent years. This greater attention to the antecedents and outcomes of employee well-being, such as job satisfaction, work engagement, and job burnout amongst others, is reflected in the proliferation of theories, constructs, and studies seeking to describe and explain why employees flourish or become exhausted at work, and the effect of employee well-being on individual behaviours and the organization at large. In this article, we provide a selective review of the current state of research in employee well-being, as well as key theories that have been employed in its study, with the aim of providing a critical assessment of the current state of employee well-being research as well as suggest future directions for the field. In particular, we discuss how research adopting intraindividual perspectives in the study of employee well-being can not only add value to our understanding of well-being but also complement the findings from between-individual studies, and offer suggestions for the development of a comprehensive theoretical model that integrates the two perspectives.

Collaborative learning has important group-level benefits, yet most studies in higher education only focus on individual benefits of collaborative learning experiences. This study extends these insights by testing a model in which teamwork quality mediates the impact of several compositional differences (gender, nationality and teamwork expertise diversity, as well as need for cognition disparity) on groups’ cognitive complexity in a sample of 159 student groups. The results support the mediating role of teamwork quality, and have important practical implications for the design of student groups in higher education.

As there is a growing trend for people to work from home, precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, this research examines the impact of blurred work-life boundaries on lifestyle and subjective well-being. Our cross-sectional study in the Netherlands demonstrates that heightened levels of blurred work-life boundaries predict negative changes in happiness through enhanced emotional exhaustion. In addition, the findings point to a dual role of lifestyle in this process. On the one hand, we observed that healthy overall lifestyle patterns buffered employees against the detrimental effects of blurred work-life boundaries and emotional exhaustion on happiness. On the other hand, employees who experienced increases in blurring of work-life boundaries reported a deterioration in healthy lifestyle behaviors, which in turn was related to reduced happiness. Paradoxically, it seems that those who would benefit the most from a healthy lifestyle are less able to sustain health-promoting behaviors. A case for shared responsibility between employers and employees is built as we discuss the practical implications of the current research.