Construction of occupational wellbeing ::are public sector really different ? : a comparative analysis of public and private hospital sector in France

This article proposes to examine whether the wellbeing of employees is influenced by the sector, public or private, in which they work. More precisely, does the nature of the sector lead to special way of constructing wellbeing? Are working conditions in the public sector really better than in the private sector? This question is studied using a national representative data base of French employees developed by the French Ministry of Labor which holds information on 28,000 individuals. The results show that the hospital sector, public or private, is not a variable structuring wellbeing, although differences in ways of dealing with constraints are perceptible at the sector level. If in both sectors, quality of working life depends on the ability of workers and teams to react to temporal demands. Each sector use different ways to adapt to those constraints. Data analysis also shows that combination of constraints produce unexpected results