Our fundamental proposition is that worker health and well-being is built on an understanding of the interaction between the worker and his or her work and workplace - specifically, how the work and workplace affect a worker’s basic physical and psychological needs. We are advocating for a shift from single variable models of wellness to an interdisciplinary model of well-being that focuses on physical and psychological states that correlate with and give rise to sustainable worker health and well-being.
Our model recognizes how the employee is embedded in multiple, overlapping work environments, and these environments affect an employee’s basic physical and psychological need satisfaction. Positive need satisfaction results in positive health and well-being, and the absence of need satisfaction or dissatisfaction results in negative health and well-being. Thus, promoting employee health, well-being, and ultimately performance and productivity is best achieved by creating physical and psychological conditions within the work environments that promote basic need satisfaction. The solution, then, is to implement changes in the workplace that have the result of satisfying important employee needs.