Quality of Working Life and Employee Outcomes: A Literature Review

Quality of working life (QWL) is a research field studied since the 1970s, which has grown considerably since then (Grote & Guest, 2017). QWL covers an employee’s feelings about various dimensions of his or her work (Mosadeghrad, Ferlie & Rosenberg, 2011) and includes dimensions related with home-work interface, working condition, job and career satisfaction, control at work, stress at work, employee commitment and general well-being (Fontinha, Van Laar & Easton, 2016). At an individual level, positive outcomes of QWL include reduced absenteeism, lower turnover, improved job satisfaction, improved individual productivity (Mosadeghrad, Ferlie & Rosenberg, 2011), but studies that analyze, in a systematic way, all the employee outcomes associated to QWL are scarce. Following the systematic literature review (SLR) methodology, this article aims to identify the employee outcomes associated to the QWL construct. This article specifically explores research studies that have examined the QWL and consequences of it to individuals in a given organizational setting. Since our focus was to gain insight on the empirical investigation about QWL, we exclude studies with a primary focus on model development or testing measurement instruments. Extensive research has been performed at PROQUEST and EBSCO databases. The terms included the following on the title of the document: quality of life at work, work-related quality of life, quality of working life, working-life quality. Only the work-related consequences of QWL have been considered. The search has been limited to peer reviewed articles, theses, and conference papers published in the English language, between 1970 and 2017. The results show how a higher level of quality of life at work can improve several and relevant employee outcomes at work.CIEQV- Centro de Investigação em Qualidade de Vida