The construct of subjective occupational well-being: Russian sample testing

Subjective occupational well-being, as shown by the authors of this article, is one of the key conditions for occupational health and career longevity in our time. Along with this, existing models associate the achievement of occupational well-being with the realisation of aspirations for personal self-development and autonomy subject to professional competence and favourable emotional and psychosomatic states prevailing in a comfortable working environment. However, these models do not take into account the social and occupational relevance of actors as a factor in their occupational well-being, although any professional occupation is initially aimed at obtaining the results required by society. Any activity, the results of which do not meet the expectations and requirements of society, become unclaimed, the demand for its participants is lost, and the problem of their subjective occupational wellbeing becomes irrelevant. Therefore, it would be incorrect to consider the assessment of personal occupational well-being without correlating it with the assessment of personal social and occupational relevance. As shown in the article, human well-being should also be considered in ethnocultural terms. In this regard, the aim of the present study was to provide a theoretical and empirical justification for the construct of subjective occupational well-being, including the component of social-occupational relevance, using a Russian sample. To verify this point, we conducted an empirical study that involved 285 employees of Russian territorial tax authorities. Their employment records in the tax service ranged from 1 to 34 years, with less than three years in 18% of the sample. Their age range was 22-62 years, with 25% of the sample on the right side of thirty. The sample included 70% of women and 30% of men. The study used The Professional Demand Questionnaire (Kharitonova, 2014), The Occupational Well-Being Inventory (Rut, 2016), The Prevalent Positive Emotional State Questionnaire (Kulikov, 2003), and the single-scale questionnaires - The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-17) and Dutch Boredom Scale (DUBS) in Russian adaptation (Schaufeli, Diystra, Ivanova, 2015). The research methods included factor analysis (principal component analysis, varimax rotation) and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The results of the factor analysis showed that the newly proposed construct of subjective occupational well-being included three independent but, at the same time, interrelated components. The first component (27% of the variance explained) contained a set of self-esteems of the employees that reflected their awareness of their social and occupational relevance (“I, as a competent and sought-after professional”). The second component (19%) contained self-esteems that reflected the sustainable dominance of positive emotional states among the employees. And the third component (14%) contained self-esteems that reflected the degree to which the employees realised their aspirations for professional growth, satisfaction with their professional achievements and relationships in the work team. Two areas of further research on the problem of subjective occupational wellbeing are considered relevant. One area is the further elaboration of the ideas of the resource approach for developing and maintaining employees’ subjective occupational well-being (Schaufeli, Bakker, Van Rhenen, 2009). The other area is research in the framework of cross-cultural and cross-occupational approaches (Brauchli et al., 2013).