The Good Working Life and Work Outcomes

In this chapter, I examine relations between the three dimensions of the good working life—job satisfaction, work meaningfulness, and work psychological richness—and several key work outcomes, including job engagement, work performance, job fatigue, and turnover intentions. Job satisfaction was generally positively related to favorable work outcomes and negatively related to job fatigue and turnover intentions. Work meaningfulness and work psychological richness were generally only weakly or non-significantly related to favorable work outcomes. Exceptions were job engagement, which was moderately and positively related to all three dimensions of the good working life, and job proactivity, which positively related to work meaningfulness and psychological richness (but not job satisfaction). Finally, work psychological richness was positively related to job fatigue, suggesting that interesting, emotionally intense, and perspective-changing work experiences may be exhausting for workers.