ABSTRACT
Employers have good reason to attempt to influence the health, well-being and even happiness of their employees: having happy, satisfied, engaged and non-burned out employees is good for business, an idea dating back to at least the human relations movement of the 1930s. In the past five decades or so, this issue has sparked much interest among organizational researchers. In an early application of the model, 47 shop-floor employees in the production department of a confectionery factory in the north of England completed a questionnaire tapping most of the concepts listed earlier, plus mental health and performance. In sociological approaches, the associations between social and psychological demands at work on the one hand and stress and illness on the other had been studied, without paying attention to the role of having control over these stressors. In a sense, workers must "invest" in their jobs: their time, skills, effort.
